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Macmillan's English Classics 



A SERIES OF ENGLISH TEXTS EDITED FOR 

USE IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS, WITH 

CRITICAL INTRODUCTIONS, 

NOTES, ETC. 



16tiio. 



Flexible 



25c. each ! 



Macaulays Essay on Addison 
Macaulay's Essay on Milton 
Tennyson's The Princess 
Eliot's Silas Marner 
Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner 
Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans 
Burke s Speech on Conciliation 
Pope's Homer's Iliad 
Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield 
Shakespeare's Macbeth 
Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley 
Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice 



OTHERS W FOLLOW 



MACAULAY'S ESSAY ON 
MILTON 



JTI^^^ 




JOHN MILTON. 



MACAULAY'S ESSAY ON 

MILTON 



EDITED AND ANNOTATED 

BY 

CHABLES WALLACE FRENCH 

PRINCIPAL OF THE HYDE PARK HIGH SCHOOL, CHICAGO 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 

1898 

All rightt reserved 






Copyright,' 1898, 
By the MACMILLAN COMPANY. 



4 t » 



.Uft^iVCw* 




Nortoooti ^rras 

J. S. Cushing & Co. — Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 






-\o 



PREFATORY NOTE 



The essay contained in this volume forms a part of 
the course prescribed by the Joint Committee on Eng- 
lish Eequirements for admission to college. While it 
can hardly be rated as the greatest of Macaulay's 
essays, there are few, if any, which present a richer 
field for investigation and study. The student will 
need to have encyclopaedia and dictionaries constantly 
at hand, and even then he will probably find some 
allusions and references which will baffle his most 
patient effort. 

In the preparation of the notes the fact has been 
recognized that many students must take up this 
work without the necessary reference books; there- 
fore the allusions have been explained much more 
fully than would otherwise be necessary. 

Where it is possible, the student should not depend 
on the notes for his information, but should look up 
the references for himself. Much interesting infor- 
mation will be secured, and valuable habits of inves- 
tigation will be formed by a careful, independent, and 
exhaustive study of this masterpiece. 



INTRODUCTION 



In the preparation of the following introductory 
matter an effort has been made to present only that 
which will be available and useful to the average 
student. Critical analyses and discussions have been 
studiously avoided. 

Generally the introduction to a work of this class 
is carefully skipped by students, and sometimes, no 
doubt, wisely. Yet there is a certain kind and amount 
of introductory work which needs to be done in order 
to prepare the way for the proper study of any author, 
and it is hoped that the following pages will not 
altogether fail to meet this necessity. 



His heart was pure and simple as a child's 
Unbreathed on by the world : in friendship warm, 
Confiding, generous, constant ; and now 
He ranks among the great ones of the earth, 
And hath achieved such glory as will last 
To future generations." — Moultrie. 



Vlii INTRODUCTION 



BIOGEAPHICAL SKETCH 

Thomas Babington Macaulay, the son of Zachary 
and Selina Mills Macaulay, was born at Eothley 
Temple, October 25, 1800. His father, a man of strict 
principles and stern and nnyielding integrity, was 
associated with Wilberforce in his anti-slavery agita- 
tion, and spent the larger part of his life in works of 
charity and philanthropy. 

Young Macaulay was a child of such marked matu- 
rity of thought and expression that he became noted 
among the friends of the family for his quaintness and 
precocity, yet his nature was so frank and wholesome 
that he escaped the slightest taint of priggishness. 
Those qualities of person and mind which were marked 
in his later years appeared very early in life and 
developed rapidly. 

" Madame, the agony has already begun to abate," 
was the answer of the four-year-old boy to the solici- 
tous inquiry of a lady, when a careless servant spilled 
some hot coffee on his legs. Not long afterwards he 
edified a group of visitors in the drawing-room by 
walking into the room and exclaiming : 

" Cursed be Sallie ; for it is written, '• Cursed be he 
that remoVeth his neighbor's landmark.' " This 
scriptural malediction was directed against a serving- 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ix 

maid who had removed a row of oyster shells with 
which he had marked out the limits of his playground. 

He early formed the habit of holding a piece of 
bread and butter in his hand, from Avhich he would 
occasionally take a bite, when he was engaged in 
study. His mother one day told him he must break 
up the habit. '^ Yes, mamma," he replied, " industry 
shall be my bread and attention my butter." 

At the age of eight he had covered a wide range of 
reading, and had accumulated a large store of know- 
ledge, which his wonderfully retentive memory enabled 
him to use with considerable facility and force. He 
soon became accustomed to express his thoughts in 
both prose and poetry. His marvellously fertile mind 
began to pour forth its treasures at an age when the 
average child has not yet learned even to read; and 
though his earlier productions have not been deemed 
worthy of preservation, they gave abundant promise 
of the maturer work with which he was destined to 
enrich literature for all time. 

One of his productions was a paper which was 
intended to persuade the people of Travancore to 
embrace the Christian religion, of which his mother 
says : " On reading it, I found it to contain a very 
clear idea of the leading facts and doctrines of that 
religion, with some strong arguments for its adoption. 
Heroic poems, epics, odes, and histories flowed from his 



X INTRODUCTION 

pen like waters from a mountain spring; and while 
they were often crude and boyish, they were the 
spontaneous expressions of a mind which was rapidly 
growing into a consciousness of its own productive 
power." 

His elementary education was secured at a small 
private school near Cambridge, where his individual 
peculiarities were allowed much freedom in their de- 
velopment, yet with sufficient guidance to coordinate 
them wisely. At the age of thirteen he wrote : 

"The books which I am at present employed in 
reading to myself are, in English, Plutarch's Lives 
and Milner's Ecclesiastical History ; in French, Fene- 
lon's Dialogues of the Dead. I shall send you back 
the volumes of Madame de Genlis's jietit romaus as 
soon as possible, and should be very much obliged for 
one or two more of them." 

He also formed a taste for fiction, which he read 
with such eagerness that very few novels in the 
English language escaped his eye. 

Notwithstanding his literary tastes and his absorption 
in his reading and studies, he never allowed school 
duties to encroach upon his love of home and friends, or 
to reconcile him to his "exile." At the beginning of his 
second half-year at school he writes to his mother : 

" My spirits are far more depressed by leaving home 
than they were last half-year. Everything brings 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH xi 

home to my recollection. You told me I should be 
happy when I once came here, but not an hour passes 
in which I do not shed tears at thinking of home." 

His biographer gives an illustration of his wonder- 
ful memory, which is referred to this period. AVhile 
sitting in a Cambridge coffee-house he picked up a 
paper and read two poetical effusions which were 
printed in it, one called "Keflections of an Exile," 
and the other a parody on a Welsh ballad. He looked 
them once through, and his mind did not recur to 
them again for forty years, at the end of which period 
he was able to repeat them without changing a word. 
Joined with these retentive powers was the ability to 
assimilate the contents of a printed page almost at a 
glance. He would read a whole book while the aver- 
age reader would be covering a chapter. Nor was 
this merely "skimming," as he could always repeat 
the substance of the book from memory afterwards. 

He entered upon all branches of study with equal 
avidity, excepting only mathematics, which he always 
regarded with intense aversion and pursued only 
under protest. In regard to this subject he writes 
home from the University: 

'•'I can scarcely bear to write on mathematics or 
mathematicians. Oh for words to express my abomi- 
nation for that science, if a name sacred to the useful 
and embellishing arts may be applied to the percep- 



xii INTRODUCTIOX 

tion and recollection of certain properties of numbers 
and figures. Oh that I had to learn astrology, or 
demonology, or school divinity; oh that I were to 
pore over Thomas Aquinas, and to adjust the relation 
of Entity with the two Predicaments, so that I were 
exempt from this miserable study! 'Discipline' of 
the mind! Say rather starvation, confinement, tort- 
ure, annihilation ! But it must be. I feel myself 
becoming a personification of algebra, a living trig- 
onometrical canon, a walking table of logarithms. All 
my perceptions of elegance and beauty are gone, or at 
least going. . . . But such is my destiny; and since 
it is so, be the pursuit contemptible, below contempt, 
or disgusting beyond abhorrence, I shall aim at no 
second place." 

At Cambridge, as at the preparatory school, he 
excelled in literary and classical studies and was 
noted for his ready and somewhat boisterous conver- 
sational powers. He early became interested in polit- 
ical questions, and began to participate in political 
discussions. While at Cambridge lie renounced the 
principles of the Tory party to which his father 
was attached, and became an ardent Whig, and after- 
wards became one of the trusted leaders of the party. 

In 1819 he won the Chancellor's medal for a poem 
on " Pompeii," and again in 1820 for a poem entitled 
" Evening." In 1822 he rocei vcd his Bachelor's degree, 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Xlll 

and in 1824 was elected to a fellowship, which was 
the more pleasing to him because it brought such 
deep gratification to his parents. 

His first literary efforts were contributed to KnigJifs 
Quarterly Magazine, for which he wrote several arti- 
cles between June, 1823, and November, 1824. In 
this latter year he made his debut as a public speaker 
at an anti-slavery meeting, where he seems to have 
made a considerable impression by his eloquence and 
exhaustive treatment of the subject. 

In 1825 he contributed his essay on "Milton" to the 
Edinburgh Review, and for twenty years after he was 
a constant writer for this celebrated magazine. His 
'•Milton" brought him wide renown, and made his 
name familiar to a wide circle of readers. While his 
work was scholarly, it was also popular and intensely 
interesting. Probably no other writer of the present 
century has so taken the world by storm as did 
Macaulay. The circulation of the Review increased 
with unexampled rapidity. In America his essays 
were reprinted in editions both cheap and expensive, • 
and were not only sold in large quantities here but 
even found a large sale in the mother country. 

Macaulay imparted to his writings a peculiar charm 
from which even the casual reader cannot escape. His 
wide reading and wonderful memory enabled him to 
range the whole field of literature and history for his 



xiv INTRODUCTION 

illustrations and allusions, and also to impart a large 
amount of information, which, if not always strictly 
accurate, was invested in such picturesque and beauti- 
ful language that it appealed directly to the higher 
tastes of his readers and did much to quicken their 
intellectual life. 

In 1825 he received his Master's degree, and in 
1826 was called to the bar, but he very soon aban- 
doned his attempt to practise law and gave himself 
up to his literary work and to the pursuit of politics. 

His articles in the Edinburgh Review brought him 
a wide popularity, which, added to his powerful ad- 
vocacy of Whig principles, made it possible for him 
to enter Parliament, and in 1830 he was returned from 
the borough of Colne. 

His first speech was in favor of a bill to remove the 
civil disabilities of the Jews, and his second was di- 
rected against slavery in the West Indies. He also 
took a prominent part in the great debate on the 
Reform Bill, and contributed materially to its final 
adoption. 

From this time his position, both in politics and 
society, was assured. He was probably the most prom- 
inent and influential member of his party in the House 
and was always listened to with interest and respect. 
He won renown not only for the eloquence and power 
of his speeches, but also for his readiness in debate. 



BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH XV 

His great stores of information and his exhaustless 
memory both combined to make him invincible in the 
hot battles that were then, waged in Parliament. 

On July 10, 1833, he made an effective speech in 
favor of an important measure then under considera- 
tion, at the close of which one of the administration 
leaders gave utterance to his admiration in the follow- 
ing words : 

" I must embrace the opportunity of expressing, not 
what I felt (for language could not express it), but of 
making an attempt to convey to the House my sym- 
pathy with it in its admiration of the speech of my 
honorable and learned friend : a speech which, I will 
venture to assert, has never been exceeded within 
these walls for the development of statesman-like 
policy and practical good sense. It exhibited all that 
is noble in oratory ; all that is sublime, I had almost 
said, in poetry; all that is truly great, exalted, and 
virtuous in human nature. If the House at large felt 
a deep interest in this magnificent display, it may 
judge of what were my emotions when I perceived in 
the hands of my honorable friend the great principles 
which he expounded glowing with fresh colors and 
arrayed in all the beauty of truth." 

This generous tribute expressed no more than the 
common estimate of Macaulay's eloquence and logical 
power. 



xvi INTRODUCTION 

In 1834 lie was made president of a new Law Com- 
mission for India and member of the Supreme Council 
of Calcutta. The salary attached to these positions was 
large, and during his three years' residence in India he 
was enabled to acquire a competency which made him 
independent for the rest of his life. 

While in India he found time to continue his studies, 
and also to write several of his brilliant essays. It 
was at this time that he acquired the knowledge of 
Oriental life and history, which he afterwards used so 
effectively in his essays on Warren Hastings and 
Lord Clive. 

In 1838 he returned to England, and was at once 
elected to Parliament from Edinburgh. From 1839 to 
1841 he was Secretary of War and occupied a seat in 
the Cabinet. In 1842 he surprised the public by 
turning aside from his usual style of composition and 
publishing the ^'Lays of Ancient Rome," which at 
once became immensely popular, and have remained 
so to the present day, despite the fact that they have 
been condemned by critics as neither poetry nor his- 
tory. In 1844 he wrote his last essay for the Review 
and then gave himself up to the preparation of his 
History of England from the Time of James II., the 
first two volumes of which appeared in 1849. The 
event of their publication had been eagerly antici- 
pated by the public, and they sold so rapidly that the 



THE ESSAYS XVU 

publishers could hardly keep pace with the demand. 
The third and fourth volumes were not ready until 
1855. 

In 1847 he was defeated for reelection to Parlia- 
ment, but in 1852 was returned by his Edinburgh con- 
stituency without any effort on his part ; but he took 
little part in the struggles and deliberations of that 
body. 

During the latter part of Macaulay's life many dis- 
tinguished honors were conferred upon him. In 1849 
he was elected Lord Eector of the University of Glas- 
gow and Fellow of the Eoyal Society. In 1857 he 
was made a peer of the realm, nnder the title of Baron 
Macaulay of Eothley. In this same year he was 
elected Foreign Member of the French Academy, was 
given the Prussian Order of Merit, and was made 
High Steward of Cambridge. But his hard and un- 
remitting labor had undermined his naturally strong 
constitution, and he died, December 28, 1859, when 
hardly past the prime of life. 



THE ESSAYS 



As a form of literature the essay is a relatively 
short disquisition upon some particular point or topic. 
It is not as formal and methodical as the more digni- 



xvill INTRODUCTION 

fied treatise, and instead of giving a thorough and 
complete treatment of its subject, is comparatively 
superficial, and is designed, as a rule, to appeal to the 
popular taste rather than to the more limited circle 
of scholarly and profound thinkers for whom the 
treatise is primarily designed. 

The essay offers an opportunity for the bright and 
witty thinker to discourse confidentially upon subjects 
in which he is interested without being required to 
give to them an orderly and exhaustive treatment, or 
to make his work conform rigidly to all the canons 
of literary criticism. 

In the essay, more than in any other impersonal 
form of literary effort, the author is able to impress 
his own personality upon his work, so that oftentimes 
it assumes the, freedom and variety and is often char- 
acterized by the individuality of the conversational 
monologue. It needs no profound student of litera- 
ture to recognize at once the author in such essays 
as those of Bacon, Addison, Macaulay, or Matthew 
Arnold. 

This species of composition has been a favorite one 
from the time of Bacon, the great English philosopher, 
and Montaigne, the greatest French writer of the six- 
teenth century, who were the first of modern writers 
to use it distinctively. It is especially adapted to 
periodical literature, and if it has not risen to its 



THE ESSAYS XIX 

highest level, it has, at any rate, appeared in its most 
agreeable and attractive form in such publications as 
the Tatler, Sjiectator, and Edinburgh Review. It has 
been used as the vehicle for historical and biographi- 
cal sketches, literary and critical discussions, political 
arguments, and ethical and religious expositions. It 
has generally been written in prose, although Pope, 
in his essays on '' Man " and '' Criticism," has shown 
that it may appear in poetic form, without loss of 
freshness or vigor. 

Some authors, like Addison and Steele, have pro- 
duced the most of their literary work in this form, 
while others, like Cowley, have used it as a diversion, 
and have gained their reputation in other fields of 
literature. 

To the scholar essay -writing may seem to be a form 
of literary dissipation, which, persisted in, will make 
the writer incapable of close and sustained work along 
any single line. Whether this be true or not, it is 
certain that the essay has influenced beneficially a 
wider class of readers than any other form of compo- 
sition outside of fiction, and even fiction has done 
much less to disseminate useful information and to 
inspire thoughtful consideration of great questions. 

Unlike poetry and fiction, the modern essay has not 
undergone a process of evolution. In its essential 
characteristics it has not changed materially since its 



XX INTRODUCTION 

first appearance in the sixteenth century. A compari- 
son between the essays of Bacon and Montaigne and 
those of ahnost any modern writer will show differ- 
ences in the personal standpoint and style of treat- 
ment, but the essential elements of composition remain 
the same. The essay, like Athena, sprang full-grown 
and fully armed into the world of literature, and took 
its place at once as a finished and perfected product. 

The essays of Macaulay, which are probably the 
most brilliant in the whole range of literature, were 
contributed mainly to the Edinburgh Eevieiv, a journal 
which had risen to an unequalled height of political, 
social, and literary power. To have the entry of its 
columns Avas to command the most direct channel for 
the spread of opinions and the shortest road to influ- 
ence and celebrity. 

Many of these essays were nominally book reviews, 
and were generally suggested by some book, whose 
unfortunate author found himself completely over- 
shadowed by his sometimes friendly, but frequently 
hostile, critic. In reality these productions are brill- 
iant essays, biographical, historical, and literary, and 
sometimes, though not often, really critical. Macau- 
lay's sympathy was too easily aroused, and his parti- 
sanship was too intense to permit him to employ 
either the cool temper of the critic or the calm im- 
partiality of the historian. 



THE ESSAYS XXl 

In the course of his reading Macaulay had accumu- 
lated an immense quantity and variety of facts, which 
his great retentive powers placed at his service when- 
ever he wanted to use them. Thus his essays be- 
came exhaustless storehouses of information gathered 
from all fields of human learning and compacted with 
great ingenuity and skill into literary masterpieces. 
Although he composed with great rapidity, he never 
wrote carelessly or hastily. He gives an insight into 
his literary methods in a letter written to the editor 
of the Edinburgh Review from Calcutta, November 
26, 1836, from which the following passage is taken : ^ 

"• At last I send you an article of interminable length 
on Lord Bacon. I hardly know whether it is not too 
long for an article in the Review, but the subject is 
of such vast extent that I could easily have made the 
paper twice as long as it is. About the historical and 
political part there is no great probability that we 
shall differ in opinion; but what I have said about 
Bacon's philosophy is widely at variance with what 
Dugald Stewart and Mackintosh have said on the 
same subject. . . . My opinion is formed not at sec- 
ond hand, like those of nine-tenths of the people who 
talk about Bacon ; but after several very attentive 
perusals of his greatest works and after a great deal 
of thought. ... I never bestowed so much care on 

1 See Trevelyau's Life and Letters of Macaulay^ Vol. I., p. 47. 



xxii INTRODUCTION 

anything I have written. There is not a sentence 
in the latter half of the article which has not been 
repeatedly recast." 

Macaulay never intended to put his essays into 
permanent form, and several times refused the re- 
quest of his publishers to collect and edit them. But 
finally the popular demand became so great that 
American publishers issued unauthorized editions, 
which found a ready sale in England as well as 
in America. Influenced by this fact, he finally con- 
sented to edit and publish an authorized edition, to 
which he attached the following preface : 

"The author of these essays is so sensible of their 
defects that he has repeatedly refused to let them 
appear in a form which might seem to indicate that 
he thought them worthy of a permanent place in 
English literature; nor would he now give his con- 
sent to the re-publication of pieces so imperfect, if, 
by withholding his consent, he could make re-publicar 
tion impossible. But as they have been reprinted 
more than once in the United States, as many Ameri- 
can copies have been imported into this country, and 
as a still larger importation is expected, he conceives 
that he cannot, in justice to the publishers of the 
Edinburgh Review, longer object to a measure which 
they consider as necessary to the protection of their 
rights, and that he cannot be accused of presumption 



THE ESSAYS xxiii 

for wishing that his writings, if they are read, may be 
read in an edition freed at least from errors of the 
press and from slips of the pen. . . . 

"No attempt has been made to remodel any of the 
pieces which are contained in these volumes. Even 
the criticism on Milton, which was written when the 
author was fresh from college, and which contains 
scarcely a paragraph such as his matured judgment 
approves, still remains overloaded with gaudy and 
ungraceful ornament. The blemishes which have 
been removed were, for the most part, blemishes 
caused by unavoidable haste. The author has some- 
times, like other contributors to periodical works, 
been under the necessity of writing at a distance 
from all books and from all advisers, often trusting 
to his memory for facts, dates, and quotations, and 
of often sending manuscripts to the post without 
reading them over. What he has composed thus rap- 
idly has often been as rapidly printed. His object 
has been that every essay should now appear as it 
probably would have appeared when it was first pub- 
lished, if he had been allowed an additional day or 
two to revise the proof-sheets with the assistance of a 
good library." 



xxiv INTRODUCTION 

THE LITERARY HISTORY OF MACAULAY'S 
AGEi 

A CONSIDERABLE number of England's most noted 
writers flourished during the life of Macaulay. At 
his birth the greatest poets of the preceding century 
were still in the fulness of their powers, while at his 
death the authors who have been so intimately con- 
nected with the glory of Victorian literature had 
already begun that brilliant work which has made 
this the most noteworthy period in the whole range 
of English literature. 

With few exceptions, the greatest English poets be- 
long to the nineteenth century. During its first quarter 
the world was dazzled by the genius of AVordsworth, 
Coleridge, Byron, Southey, Keats, and Shelley; and 
they had hardly passed from the stage when the first 
works of Browning and Tennyson were produced. 

iThe Joint Committee on English Requirements, at its session in 
New York in 181)7, recommended tlie study of the literary history of 
the various periods, to which the prescribed books belong, in connec- 
tion with their study. No attempt is made here even to sketch the 
literary history of this period further than is necessary to furnish 
a background or, what may be so called, a literary setting for 
Macaulay's works. A more extended study of the general features 
of the period may be carried on with profit ; yet it should not be 
forgotten that the great purpose of all literary study should be 
found in the thought of the author, and not in the details of his 
life history. 



LITERARY HISTORY OF MACAULAY'S AGE XXV 

The history of this century contains the names of 
nearly all of the great Djasters of English fiction, of 
whom Scottj Thackeray, Dickens, Bulwer-Lytton, INIiss 
Edgeworth, Charlotte Bronte, and Miss Austen were 
contemporary with Macaulay. 

Two writers of his period may be fairly classed with 
our author, although they differed widely from him in 
many essential characteristics. These were De Quincey 
and Carlyle, who, with Macaulay, will easily rank among 
the greatest of English essayists. 

Like Macaulay, De Quincey began his literary career 
by contributing to periodical literature, but, unlike him, 
he also ended it there; and he has the distinction of 
being the only great English prose writer who never 
v/rote a book. Eew writers since the time of Aristotle 
have covered so broad a field, and fewer still have 
proved themselves so thoroughly at home in every 
department of human thought and investigation, yet 
he never sustained any line of thought or investigation 
long enough to produce a work which may be called a 
real contribution to the intellectual life of the world. 
The literary value of his works is great, and in beauty 
and grace, as well as dignity, his style is hardly ex- 
celled; yet he cannot be ranked among the great 
masters of English thought. 

In this respect De Quincey was distinctly inferior 
to Macaulay and Carlyle, each of whom engaged in 



XXvi INTRODUCTION 

exhaustive research, and produced works that have 
enriched literature for all time. 

Many points of resemblance will be discovered be- 
tween De Quincey and Macaulay from a comparative 
study of their works. They were both indefatigable 
readers, and possessed of wonderful retentive powers. 
Both wrote for magazines on a wide range of topics. 
Each was gifted with peculiar beauties of style and 
with a remarkable exuberance of thought ; but in their 
personal characteristics they were at the antipodes. 
The one was retiring, introspective, and morbid ; the 
other was a man of affairs, and gifted with the power 
of leadership. Both were masters of the now almost 
forgotten art of conversation. 

Between Macaulay and Carlyle there were few 
resemblances and fewer elements of sympathy. They 
were both great prose writers, and interested in the 
same general class of subjects. Each was attracted to 
the study of history, and particularly to questions 
relating to political and social conditions ; but their 
view points were essentially antagonistic. The one 
was an interested participator in the political activi- 
ties of his times, and conducted his historical studies 
and investigations from the standpoint of a partisan, 
while the other was a philosopher, and almost a 
recluse. 

Yet while Macaulay is more attractive and, by the 



LITERARY HISTORY OF MACAULAY'S AGE xxvil 

ordinary reader, mucli more easily understood and 
sympathized with, Carlyle is much the stronger char- 
acter, and his work has influenced English thought 
more profoundly. 

Macaulay's greatest work is read to-day more for the 
brilliancy of his style and the power and realism of his 
characterizations than for the accuracy of his judgments 
or his contributions to historical knowledge. On the 
other hand, Carlyle's Cromwell is not only good history, 
but it has reversed the judgment of the English people, 
and led to the recognition of its hero as the second 
founder of English liberties. His French Revolution 
and Frederick the Great are perhaps the most note- 
worthy works of their class in the English language, 
and the latter practically exhausts the historical ma- 
terials of the period. Yet his most characteristic work 
is found in his literary and critical essays, which rise 
to a higher intellectual plane than any which preceded 
them, and have probably not been excelled by any 
similar productions in the whole range of literature. 

Among the poets who were strictly contemporary 
with Macaulay were Byron, Shelley, Keats, South ey, 
Coleridge, and Wordsworth. The last three were born 
between 1770 and 1775, but the greater part of their 
work was done during Macaulay's lifetime. All may 
be ranked among England's greatest poets. "Kubla 
Khan," '' Christabel," and " The Ancient Mariner " by 



xxvill INTRODUCTION 

Coleridge, the " Ode on Intimations of Immortality " 
and " Lines written at Tintern Abbey " by Wordsworth, 
and the "Lyrics" of Shelley are among the noblest 
products of poetic genius to be found in any language. 

Another famous contemporary was Sydney Smith, 
the greatest of English w^its, of whom Macaulay speaks 
characteristically in one of his letters as follows : 

"The other day as I was changing my neckcloth, 
which my wig had disfigured, my good landlady 
knocked at the door of my bedroom and told me that 
Mr. Smith Avished to see me, and was in my room 
below. Of all names by which men are called there 
is none which conveys a less determinate idea to the 
mind than that of Smith. . . . Down I went, and, to 
my utter amazement, beheld the Smith of Smiths, 
Sydney Smith, alias Peter Plymley. I had forgotten 
his very existence till I discerned the queer contrast 
between the clerical amplitude of his person and the 
most unclerical wit, whim, and petulance of his eye. 
... I am very w^ell pleased at having this oppor- 
tunity of becoming better acquainted with a man who, 
in spite of innumerable affectations and oddities, is 
certainly one of the wittiest and most original writers 
of our times. ... I have really taken a great liking 
to him. He is full of wit, humor, and shrewdness. 
He is not one of the show-talkers who reserve all 
their good things for special occasions. It seems to 



LITERARY HISTORY OF MACAULAY^S AGE XX IX 

be his greatest luxury to keep his wife and daughters 
laughing for two or three hours every day." 

In the course of Macaulay's life he came into close 
personal acquaintance not only with political leaders, 
but with many of the more noted authors of his time. 
Many allusions to them occur in his letters, which are 
interesting, as they indicate his mental attitude towards 
writers whose standing was not at that time estab- 
lished. A few of these allusions are quoted below.^ 

"Pride and Prejudice and the five sister novels 
remained without a rival in his affections. He never 
for a moment wavered in his allegiance to Miss Aus- 
ten. In 1858 he wrote in his journal: 'If I could get 
materials I really would w^rite a short life of that 
wonderful woman, and raise a little money to put up 
a monument to her in Winchester Cathedral.' " 

In a letter to his sister he says : 

" I am glad you have read Madame de Stael's AUe- 
magne. The book is a foolish one in many respects, 
but it abounds with information and shows great men- 
tal power. She was certainly the first Avoman of her 
age ; Miss Edgeworth, I think, the second ; and Miss 
Austen the third." 

1 These allusions and many more may be found in Trevelyan's 
Life of MacMulay, which is one of the few great biographies iu the 
English language. Every student of Macaulay ought to be familiar 
with this work. 



XXX INTRODUCTION 

Of Lord Byron lie says : 

" The worst thing that I know about Lord Byron is 
the very unfavorable impression he made upon men 
who certainly were not inclined to judge him harshly, 
and who, as far as I know, were never personally ill- 
used by him. I have heard hundreds and thousands 
of people, who never saw him, rant about him ; but 
I never heard a single expression of fondness for him 
fall from the lips of any of those who knew him well." 

The following extract from a letter to the editor of 
the Edinburgh Review is especially interesting : 

Oct. 19, 1842. 

" Dear Napier : This morning I received Dickens's 
book. I have now read it. It is impossible for me to 
review it ; nor do I think you would wish me to do so. 
I cannot praise it, and I will not cut it up. I cannot 
praise it though it contains a few lively dialogues and 
descriptions ; for it seems to me to be on the whole a 
failure. ... A reader who wants an amusing account 
of the United States had better go to Mrs. Trollope, 
coarse and malignant as she is. A reader who wants 
information about American politics, manners, and lit- 
erature had better go even to so poor a creature as 
Buckingham. In short, I pronounce the book, in spite 
of some gleams of genius, at once frivolous and dull. 

'' Therefore I shall not praise it. Neither will I 



LITERARY HISTORY OF MACAULAY'S AGE XXXI 

attack it; first, because I have eaten salt with Dick- 
ens ; secondly, because he is a good man and a man of 
real talent ; thirdly, because he hates slavery as heartily 
as I do ; and fourthly, because I wish to see him en- 
rolled in our blue and yellow corps, where he may do 
excellent service as a skirmisher and sharpshooter.'' 

He had a great admiration for Miss Edgeworth, the 
accomplished author of Castle JRackreyit, Ormond, 3foral 
Tales, etc. 

"Among all the incidents connected Avith the publi- 
cation of his History, nothing pleased Macaulay so 
much as the gratification which he contrived to give 
Maria Edgeworth, as a small return for the enjoyment 
which, during more than fifty years, he had derived 
from her charming writings. That lady, who was in 
her eighty-third winter and within a few months of 
her death, says, in the course of a letter addressed to 
Dr. Holland: *And now, my good friend, I require 
you to believe that all the admiration I have ex- 
pressed for Macaulay's work is quite uninfluenced by 
the self-satisfaction, pride, surprise, I had in finding 
my own name in a note ! I had formed my opinion, 
and expressed it to my friends who were reading the 
book to me, before I came to that note. Moreover, 
there was a mixture of shame, and a tinge of pain, 
with the pleasure and pride I felt in having a line in 



xxxii INTRODUCTION 

this immortal History given to me, when there is no 
mention of Sir Walter Scott throughout the work, 
even in places where it seems impossible that the 
historian should resist paying the becoming tribute 
which genius owes, and loves to jjay, to genius. . . . 
Meanwhile be so good as to make my grateful and 
deepl}^ felt thanks to the great author for the honor 
which he has done me.' " 

Perhaps this omission may be explained by the fol- 
lowing passage from a letter to Mr. Napier. His 
estimate of the personal character of Scott is widely 
at variance with the facts as known to us. 

" Then, again, I have not, from the little I do know 
about him, formed so high an opinion of his character 
as most people seem to entertain, and as it would be 
expedient for the Edinburgh Review to express. He 
seems to me to have been most carefully and success- 
fully on his guard against the sins which most easily 
beset literary men. On that side he multiplied his 
precaution, and set a double watch. Hardly any 
writer of note has been so free from the petty jeal- 
ousies and morbid irritabilities of our caste. But I 
do not think that he kept himself equally pure from 
faults of a very different kind, from the faults of a 
man of the world. In politics, a bitter and unscrupu- 
lous partisan ; profuse and ostentatious in expense ; 
agitated by the hopes and fears of a gambler ; perpet- 



LITERARY HISTORY OF MACAULAY'S AGE xxxiii 

ually sacrificing the perfection of his compositions, and 
the durability of his fame, to his eagerness for money ; 
writing with the slovenly haste of Dryden, in order 
to satisfy wants which were not, like those of Dryden, 
caused by circumstances beyond his control, but wdiich 
were produced by his extravagant waste or rapacious 
speculation ; this is the w^ay in which he appears to me. 
I am sorry for it, for I sincerely admire the greater 
part of his works; but I cannot think him a high- 
minded man, or a man of very strict principle." 

With this unfavorable estimate of Scott by Macau- 
lay it is interesting to compare that of the great critic, 
Taine, which is illustrated by the following extracts : 

"He (Sir Walter Scott) is a good Protestant, a 
good husband, a good father and very moral. . . . 
In critical refinement and benevolent philosoj^hy, he 
resembles Addison. He resembles him again by the 
purity and endurance of his moral principles. His 
amanuensis, Mr. Laidlaw, told him that he was doing 
great good by his attractive and noble tales, and that 
young people would no longer wash to look in the 
literary rubbish of the circulating libraries. When 
Walter Scott heard this, his eyes filled with tears. 
On his death-bed he said to his son-in-law: 'Lock- 
hart, I have but a minute to speak to you. My dear, 
be a good man, — be virtuous, be religious, be a good 
man. Nothing else will give you any comfort wdien 



XXXIV INTRODUCTION 

you come to lie here.' This was ahiiost his last word. 
By this fundamental honesty and this broad human- 
ity, he was the Homer of modern citizen life." 

It is possible that Macaulay's judgment may have 
been biased by the fact that while he was an ardent 
AVhig, Scott was an equally ardent Tory. 



PROMINENT AUTHORS WHO WERE CONTEMPORARY 
WITH MACAULAY. 

Walter Savage Laudor 1775-1864 

Jane Austen 1775-1817 

Maria Edgeworth 1767-1849 

Sydney Smith 1771-1845 

Leigh Hunt 1784-1859 

Thomas Carlyle 1795-1881 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning .... 1809-1861 

Edward Bulwer (Lord Lytton) .... 1805-1873 

Alfred Tennyson 1809-1892 

Charles Dickens 1812-1870 

Robert Browning 1812-1889 

William M. Thackeray 1811-1863 

Lord Byron 1788-1824 

Percy B. Shelley ...:... 1792-1822 

Thomas De Quincey 1785-1859 

John Keats 1795-1821 

Southey 1774-1843 

Coleridge 1772-1834 

Wordsworth 1770-1850 

Scott 1771-1832 



SUGGESTIONS FOR THE STUDENT 



Reading to be profitable must be careful and in- 
telligent. The careless and hasty reader not only- 
fails to gain the knowledge and culture which are the 
legitimate products of all reading, but even dissipates 
his intellectual energies, and eventually destroys his 
ability to appreciate good literature. That method of 
reading only is intelligent which leads to a clear com- 
prehension of the author's spirit and intent; and its 
necessary conditions are a knowledge of his style and 
vocabulary and such a warm interest in the develop- 
ment of his line of thought and investigation as will 
serve for an inspiration to a careful and earnest study 
of his works. 

Much that is written in literary form is not worth 
the reading, but no true work of literature will ever 
fail to repay the student for his labor upon it. The 
wise selection of a course of reading is therefore a 
matter of the highest importance ; yet there are so 
many prepared lists and helpful suggestions which 

XXXV 



xxxvi INTRODUCTION 

are easily accessible tliat no earnest student need go 
astray. 

Before beginning the study of an author it is well to 
learn something about his character and the position 
which he occupies in the literary history of his age. 
Oftentimes a knowledge of his personal life will lead 
to a better comprehension of his works. Such study 
should not be minute, and must be taken up not merely 
to satisfy curiosity, but with the sustained purpose of 
ascertaining, as far as possible, the sources of his 
inspiration and the general character and trend of 
his thought. 

Many authors who are thought to be obscure by the 
general reader are so only because their spirit and mo- 
tives are not understood, and therefore their literary 
productions seem illogical, and sometimes almost or 
quite meaningless. Browning, Avho is one of the 
richest and most fruitful of modern writers, furnishes 
a good illustration of this fact. The ordinary reader 
fails to understand him because he does not even 
apprehend his real personality and truest and deepest 
purposes ; and thus his language, which is so heavily 
laden with the rarest treasures of thought, becomes 
unintelligible. 

The student who is seeking to develop a love for good 
literature should never cultivate a critical or censorious 
spirit. His aim should be to search for the true and 



SUGGESTIONS FOB THE STUDENT xxxvii 

the beautiful, and not to be on the lookout for faults 
and blemishes. The acquisition of such a critical spirit 
must invariably blind the student to those very elejuents 
which alone are worth his study. 

If the student searches for faults in Macaulay's works 
he will surely find them, and often flagrant ones ; but 
his aim should be far different from this. It is true 
that an intelligent reading of either Macaulay's Essays 
or his History cannot fail to disclose his faults ; but 
these should be passed over with as little notice as 
possible, and the attention concentrated upon the 
beauties of his style and thought. Aside from their 
brilliancy, there is a peculiarly magnetic quality in 
Macaulay's works which at once wins the reader and 
brings him into close sympathy with their author. 
The student who studies him with an earnest purpose 
will soon find himself under the sway of his magic, 
and his works will be invested with an almost irre- 
sistible interest. 

It is a fundamental principle of all literary study 
that the student should first gain a fair knowledge of 
the work as a whole, the general trend of reasoning, 
and the conclusions which the author desires to estab- 
lish, before proceeding to an analytical and detailed 
study. So in taking up these essays the student should 
first read them through carefully Avithout stopping to 
look up references or to verify allusions, in order to 



xxxviil INTRODUCTION 

gain a general view of the whole field. Then he 
should turn back and begin a more or less exhaustive 
study of the essay, giving his attention mainly to 
the author's style and vocabulary, and to its general 
content. 

Macaulay's vocabulary was noted chiefly for its wide 
extent and for his good taste in the use of words. He 
displays no eccentricities, nor does he employ unusual 
or provincial forms of speech. In his choice of words 
he is both dignified and graceful. These and other 
characteristics should be carefully noted, but too much 
time should not be devoted to the study of words in 
this or in any other masterpiece. It must always be 
remembered that words are but the instruments by 
which thought is expressed, and only enough time 
should be given to their study to enable the student 
to master the intricacies of the author's thought. It 
is the living spirit which quickens, and words are but 
the vehicles by which it is conveyed. 

The second subject of study is the author's style, 
and it offers a most fruitful field for interesting and 
profitable investigation. Few authors have been char- 
acterized by a style at once so brilliant and so clear ; 
so florid and picturesque, and yet so simple and direct. 
His essays abound in imagery, comparisons, contrasts, 
and allusions. From his boundless stores of informa- 
tion he draws copiously and with marked spontaneity 



SUGGESTIOWS FOB THE STUDENT xxxix 

illustrations of his subject which cover the widest 
possible range of human thought and life. He knows 
not only the great events and personages of the world's 
history and literature, but he evinces a remarkable 
familiarity with persons and deeds so inconspicuous 
as hardly to find mention in the most detailed annals 
of the past. The student who conscientiously follows 
out each allusion and illustration in any one of his 
greater essays will have to search through many dic- 
tionaries, encyclopsedias, and histories, and will acquire 
no small fund of useful and interesting information. 
And whoever does this will gain some idea of the 
wide range of reading, the indefatigable industry, 
and the marvellous memory of the author, who wrote 
many of these essays, as he himself says, afar from 
books and libraries, without an opportunity even to 
verify the references Avith which his memory supplied 
him so bountifully. 

The student should study carefully the various con- 
structive devices which he employs to convey his 
meaning, such as the balanced and periodical sentence ; 
the antithetical and climactic forms of expression; 
and the numerous rhetorical figures, such as pathos, 
the various forms of comparison and contrast, humor, 
hyperbole, irony, etc., all of which he frequently uses 
with power and effect. Numerous illustrations of all 
of these and others may be found in each essay, and 



xl INTRODUCTION 

they should be identified and studied both analytically 
and constructively. 

His style may be characterized briefly as clear, simple, 
animated, and strong. It has sometimes been called 
artificial, but the true lover of Macaulay will find 
it the natural and artistic expression of his sym- 
pathetic mind, and not a series of labored devices to 
attract readers or impress his points. In the long run 
the popular verdict of a writer is the true one. Critics 
may still carp and cavil at the author of " Milton " 
and " The Lays," but by the popular tribunal he has 
been acquitted of their charges and placed forever 
among the great masters of thought and expression 
which the English-speaking world has produced. 

The last and most important topic of study is found 
in an author's purposes and the steps by which he at- 
tains them. And here the easiest and by far the most 
interesting part of the work is reached in a study of 
Macaulay. 

In his expression he is always clear and frank. No 
matter how radical his views, he never fears to utter 
them. He never indulges in obscurities or subtleties 
of thought. His opinions never lack definition ; and 
he never fails to express them so clearly that they 
cannot be misunderstood, and so forcibly that it seems 
almost presumption to attempt to discredit them. It 
is true that he is so vigorous a thinker, and becomes so 



SUGGESTIONS FOR THE STUDENT xli 

absorbed in the subject with which he is dealing at 
the moment, that he tends towards radical and ex- 
aggerated views, so that his subject becomes unduly- 
exalted and the things with which he compares or 
contrasts it correspondingly depreciated. But it is 
by no means a harmful thing for a young person to 
come into an intimate acquaintance with a man who 
can be at one moment an impetuous lover and at the 
next moment a violent hater, and one Avho is not afraid 
to express his opinions and is never at a loss for vig- 
orous language to clothe them in. 

After having read the essay as a whole, the student 
should carefully look up and verif}^ all its allusions 
and references, re-reading it in the light of his increased 
knowledge and expanded horizon. He should then 
make a paragraph summary, that is, he should express 
the main idea of each paragraph in a single pointed 
sentence, in proper order. From this summary he 
should proceed to make a skeleton of the essay by 
selecting the most important points, expanding them, 
and joining to them in their proper order and relation- 
ship the minor or subordinate elements, until a com- 
plete outline of the whole essay has been formed. 

This outline should then be studied, point by point, 
to ascertain whether Macaulay developed his thought 
ill a careful and logical manner ; whether he followed 
his line of argument closely or indulged in digressions ; 



Xlii INTRODUCTION 

whether the system of paragraphing is continuous and 
harmonious or is characterized by abrupt changes ; 
whether the thought is expressed in plain language or 
in figured speech, and if so how the meaning is modi- 
fied or expanded; does he in any point exaggerate 
or take a false position, and finally, having defined his 
purpose, has he attained it ? 

If this method of study is carefully followed out, 
and supplemented by a wider reading of Macaulay's 
works, it is believed that the student will not only be 
benefited intellectually, but that something of the 
author's strong sweet spirit will enter into his life to 
broaden and elevate it. 



LORD MACAULAY'S PEOSE WRITINGS, WITH 
DATE OF PUBLICATION. 

Fragments of a Roman Tale. June, 1823. 

On the Royal Society of Literature. June, 1823. 

Scenes from Athenian Revels. January, 1824. 

Criticisms of the Principal Italian Writers, No. I., Dante. 

January, 1824. 
Criticisms of the Principal Italian Writers, No. II., Petrarch. 

April, 1824. 
Some Account of the Great Lawsuit between the Parishes of 

St. Dennis and St. George in the Water. April, 1824, 
A Conversation between Mr, Abraham Cowley and Mr. John 

Milton touching the Great Civil War. August, 1824. 
On the Athenian Orntors, August, 1824, 
A Prophetic Account of a Grand National Epic Poem, to be 

entitled "The Wellingtoniad," and to be published a.d. 

2824. November, 1824. 
On Mitford's History of Greece. November, 1824. 

Note.— Up to this time his essays were published in Knight's 
Quarterly Magazine, but all the rest appeared in the Edinburgh 
Review. 

Milton. August, 1825. 
The West Indies. January, 1825. 
The London University. February, 1826. 
Machiavelli. March, 1827. 

Social and Industrial Capacities of Negroes. March, 1827. 
xliii 



xli V INTROD UC TION^ 

The Present Administration. June, 1827. 

John Dryden. January, 1828. 

History. May, 1828. 

Hallam's Constitutional History. September, 1828. 

Mill on Government. March, 1829. 

AVestminster Reviewer's Defence of Mill. June, 1829 

Utilitarian Theory of Government. October, 1829. 

Southey's Colloquies on Society. January, 1830. 

Mr. Robert Montgomery's Poems. April, 1830. 

Sadler's Law of Population. July, 1830. 

Southey's Edition of Pilgrim's Progress. December, 1830. 

Sadler's Refutation Refuted. January, 1831. 

Civil Disabilities of the Jews. January, 1831. 

Moore's Life of Lord Byron. June, 1831. 

Croker's Edition of Boswell's Life of Johnson. September, 

1831. 
Lord Nugent's Memorials of Hampden. December, 1831. 
Rev. Edward Nave's Memoirs of Lord Burleigh. April, 1832. 
Etienne Dumont's Memoirs of Mirabeau, July, 1832. 
Lord Mahon's History of the War of the Succession in Spain, 

January, 1833. 
Horace Walpole. October, 1833. 
William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. January 1834. 
Sir James Mackintosh. July, 1835. 
Lord Bacon. July, 1837. 
Sir William Temple. October, 1838. 
Gladstone on Church and State. April, 1839. 
Lord Clive. January, 1840. 
Von Ranke. October, 1840. 
Leigh Hunt. January, 1841. 
Lord Holland. July, 1841. 
Warren Hastings. October, 1841. 



PROSE WRITINGS xlv 

Frederick the Great. April, 1842. 

Madame D'Arblay. January, 1843. 

The Life and Writings of Addison. July, 1843. 

Barrere, April, 1844. 

The Earl of Chatham. October, 1844. 

Note. — The following biographies were contributed to the 
EncyclopxcUa Britannica. 

Francis Atterbury. December, 1853. 
John Bunyan. May, 1854. 
Oliver Goldsmith. February, 1856. 
Samuel Johnson. December, 1856. 
William Pitt. January, 1859. 

In addition to these essays he wrote upwards of 
eighty short biographical sketches of persons more or 
less noted. 

In 1848 he published the first two volumes of his 
History of England from the Accession of James II. 

In 1852 the third and fourth volumes appeared. 
He was engaged in the preparation of the fifth 
volume, when he died. 



MISCELLANEOUS POEMS. 



Epitaph on Henry Martyn. 
Lines to the Memory of Pitt. 
A Radical War-Song. 



xlvi INTRODUCTION 

The Battle of Moncontour. 

The Battle of Naseby. 

Sermon in a Churchyard. 

Translation from A. V. Arnault. 

Dies Irae. 

The Marriage of Tirzah and Ahirad. 

The Country Clergyman's Trip to Cambridge. 

Song. 

Political Georgics. 

The Deliverance of Vienna. 

The Last Buccaneer. 

Epitaph on a Jacobite. 

Lines written in August, 1847. 

Translation from Plautus. 

Paraphrase. 

Inscription on the Statue of Lord William Bentinck. 

Epitaph on Sir Benjamin Heath Malkin. 

Epitaph on Lord Metcalfe. 

Pompeii. 

The Battle of Ivry. 

The Armada. 

The Cavalier's March to London. 

The Lays of Ancient Rome : 

Horatius. 

The Battle of the Lake Regillus. 

Virginia. 

The Prophecy of Capys. 



ESSAY ON MILTON xlvii 



THE ESSAY ON MILTON 

This essay was the first of the long list of brilliant 
compositions which Macaulay contributed to the Edin- 
burgh Review, and in some respects was the most not- 
able. It is to be studied, not as a critical or historical 
production, but as a fervent personal plea for a poet 
and man of whom the English people of that age knew 
little and cared less. For Milton as a poet Macaulay 
had a profound admiration, which yielded in fervency 
only to his affection for him as a man, and his glowing 
enthusiasm and brilliant panegyric may excuse his 
failure as a critic and interpreter of Milton's art. As 
Carlyle rescued Cromwell from the infamy to which he 
had been consigned, and gained him a deserved recog- 
nition as the greatest of English statesmen and gen- 
erals, so Macaulay corrected the false judgment which 
had been passed on Milton and his works through the 
influence of Johnson's misleading Life and restored 
him to his rightful position as the greatest, save one, 
of English poets. 

Some passages of this essay are among the most 
striking and beautiful to be found in the whole range 
of English prose, notably the passages in which he 
describes the Puritans and Cavaliers. But his treat- 



xlviii INTRODUCTION 

ment of Milton's poetry, and his remarks upon the 
theory of poetry, are altogether misleading and should 
not be accepted. They will, however, afford opportu- 
nities for much profitable study and discussion. 

The student should have at hand some standard life 
of Milton, to which he should refer freely during the 
study of this essay. Masson's Life is by far the best 
of the numerous biographies of Milton. 



MILTON ' 

(Edinburgh Beview, August, 1825) 

Towards the close of the year 1823, Mr. Lemon,° 
deputy keeper of the state papers, in the course of his 
researches among the presses of his office, met with a 
large Latin manuscript. With it were found corrected 
copies of the foreign despatches written by Milton, 
while he filled the office of Secretary," and several 
papers relating to the Popish Trials ° and the Eye- 
house Plot.° The whole was wrapped up in an en- 
velope, superscribed To Mr. SJdnner, Merchant ° On 
examination, the large manuscript proved to be the lo 
long-lost Essay on the Doctrines of Christianity, which, 
according to Wood and Toland,° Milton finished after 
the Eestoration, and deposited with Cyriac Skinner. 
Skinner, it is well known, held the same political 

1 Joannis Miltoni AngVi, cle Doctrind Christiana Ubri duo 
posthumi. A Treatise on Christian Doctrine, compiled from the 
Holy Scriptures alone. By John Milton, translated from the 
original by Charles R. Sumner, MA., etc., etc, 1825. 

Note. — This character (°) placed after a word indicates a ref- 
erence to the notes. 

B 1 



2 MILTON 

opinions with his illustrious friend. It is therefore 
probable, as Mr. Lemon conjectures, that he may have 
fallen under the suspicions of the government during 
that persecution of the Whigs ° which followed the 
dissolution of the Oxford Parliament, ° and that, in 
consequence of a general seizure of his papers, this 
work may have been brought to the office in which it 
has been found. But whatever the adventures of the 
manuscript may have been, no doubt can exist that it 

10 is a genuine relic of the great poet. 

Mr. Sumner, ° who was commanded by his Majesty 
to edit and translate the treatise, has acquitted himself 
of his task in a manner honorable to his talents and to 
his character. His version is not indeed very easy or 
elegant; but it is entitled to the praise of clearness 
and fidelity. His notes abound with interesting quota- 
tions, and have the rare merit of really elucidating the 
text. The preface is evidently the work of a sensible 
and candid man, firm in his own religious opinions, 

20 and tolerant towards those of others. 

The book itself will not add much to the fame of 
Milton. It is, like all his Latin works, well written, 
though not exactly in the style of the prize essays of 
Oxford and Cambridge. There is no elaborate imita- 
tion of classical antiquity, no scrupulous purity, none 



MILTON 3 

of the ceremonial cleanness which characterizes the 
diction of our academical Pharisees. The author does 
not attempt to polish and brighten his composition 
into the Ciceronian gloss and brilliancy. He does 
not, in short, sacrifice sense and spirit to pedantic 
refinements. The nature of his subject compelled 
him to use many words 

** That would have made Quiutilian stare and gasp."° 

But he writes with as much ease and freedom as if 
Latin were his mother tongue; and, where he is least lo 
happy, his failure seems to arise from the carelessness 
of a native, not from the ignorance of a foreigner. 
We may apply to him what Denham° with great fe- 
licity says of Cowley. ° He wears the garb, but not 
the clothes of the ancients. 

Throughout the volume are discernible the traces 
of a powerful and independent mind, emancipated 
from the influence of authority, and devoted to the 
search of truth. Milton professes to form his system 
from the Bible alone; and his digest of Scriptural 20 
texts is certainly among the best that have appeared. 
But he is not always so happy in his inferences as in 
his citations. 



4 MILTON 

Some of the heterodox doctrines which he avows 
seemed to have excited considerable amazement, par- 
ticularly his Arianism,° and his theory on the subject 
of polygamy. ° Yet we can scarcely conceive that any 
person could have read the Paradise Lost without sus- 
pecting him of the former; nor do we think that any 
reader, acquainted with the history of his life, ought 
to be much startled at the latter. The opinions which 
he has expressed respecting the nature of the Deity, ° 

10 the eternity ° of matter, and the observation of the 
Sabbath, ° might, we think, have caused more just 
surprise. 

But we will not go into the discussion of these 
points. The book, w^ere it far more orthodox or far 
more heretical than it is, w^ould not much edify or 
corrupt the present generation. The men of our time 
are ^ot to be converted or perverted by quartos. A 
few more days, and this essay will follow the Defensio 
PopuU,° to the dust and silence of the upper shelf. 

20 The name of its author, and the remarkable circum- 
stances attending its publication, will secure to it a 
certain degree of attention. For a month or two it 
will occupy a few minutes of chat in every drawing- 
room, and a few columns in every magazine; and it 
will then, to borrow the elegant language of the play- 



MILTON 5 

bills, be withdrawn, to make room for the forthcoming 
novelties. 

We wish however to avail ourselves of the interest, 
transient as it may be, which this work has excited. 
The dexterous Capuchins ° never choose to preach on 
the life and miracles of a saint, till they have awak- 
ened the devotional feelings of their auditors by exhib- 
iting some relic of him, a thread of his garment, a 
lock of his hair, or a dro]3 of his blood. On the same 
principle, w^e intend to take advantage of the late in- 
teresting discovery, and, while this memorial of a 
great and good man is still in the hands of all, to say 
something of his moral and intellectual qualities. 
Nor, we are convinced, will the severest of our readers 
blame us if, on an occasion like the present, we turn 
for a short time from the topics of the day, to com- 
memorate, in all love and reverence, the genius and 
virtues of John Milton, the poet, the statesman, the 
philosopher, the glory of -English literature, the 
champion and the martyr of English liberty. ° 

It is by his poetry that Milton is best known; and 
it is of his poetry that we wish first to speak. By 
the general suffrage of the civilized world, his place 
has been assigned among the greatest masters of the 
art. His detractors, however, though outvoted, have 



6 MIL TO y 

not been silenced. There are many critics, and some 
of great name, who contrive in the same breath to 
extol the poems and to decry the poet. The works 
they acknowledge, considered in themselves, may be 
classed among the noblest productions of the human 
mind. But they will not allow the author to rank 
with those great men who, born in the infancy of civ- 
ilization, supplied, by their own powers, the want of 
instruction, and, though destitute of models them- 

10 selves, bequeathed to posterity models which defy 
imitation. Milton, it is said, inherited what his pred- 
ecessors created; he lived in an enlightened age; he 
received a finished education ; and we must therefore, 
if we would form a just estimate of his powers, make 
large deductions in consideration of these advantages. 
We venture to say, on the contrary, paradoxical as 
the remark may appear, that no poet has ever had to 
struggle with more unfavorable circumstances than 
Milton. He doubted, as lie has himself owned, 

20 whether he had not been born " an age too late." ° For 
this notion Johnson has thought fit to make him the 
butt of much clumsy ridicule." The poet, we believe, 
understood the nature of his art better than the critic. 
He knew that his poetical genius derived no advantage 
from the civilization which surrounded him, or from 



MILTON 7 

the learning which he had acquired; and he looked 
back with something like regret to the ruder age of 
simple words and vivid impressions. 

°We think that, as civilization advances, poetry 
almost necessarily declines. Therefore, though we 
fervently admire those great works of imagination 
which have appeared in dark ages, we do not admire 
them the more because they have appeared in dark 
ages. On the contrary, we hold that the most won- 
derful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem lo 
produced in a civilized age. We cannot understand 
why those who believe in that most orthodox article 
of literary faith, that the earliest poets are generally 
the best, should wonder at the rule as if it were the 
exception. Surely the uniformity of the phenomenon 
indicates a corresponding uniformity in the cause. 

The fact is, that common observers reason from the 
progress of the experimental science to that of the 
imitative arts. The improvement of the former is 
gradual and slow. Ages are spent in collecting ma- 20 
terials, ages more in separating and combining them. 
Even when a system has been formed, there is still 
something to add, to alter, or to reject. Every gen- 
eration enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed to 
it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented 



8 MILTON 

by fresh acquisitions, to future ages. In these pur- 
suits, therefore, the first speculators lie under great 
disadvantages, and, even when they fail, are entitled 
to praise. Their pupils, with far inferior intellectual 
powers, speedily surpass them in actual attainments. 
Every girl who has read Mrs. jMarcet's ° little dialogues 
on Political Economy could teach Montague ° or Wal- 
pole ° many lessons in finance. Any intelligent man 
may now, by resolutely applying himself for a few 

[o years to mathematics, learn more than the great 
Newton ° knew after half a century of study and 
meditation. 

But it is not thus with music, with painting, or 
with sculpture. Still less is it tlius with poetry. 
The progress of refinement rarely supplies these arts 
with better objects of imitation. It may indeed im- 
prove the instruments Avhich are necessary to the me- 
chanical operations of the musician, the sculptor, and 
the painter. But language, the machine of the poet, 

20 is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. 
Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then 
abstract. They advance from particular images to 
general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlight- 
ened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilized 
people is poetical. 



MILTON 9 

This change in the hmguage of men is partly the 
cause and partly the effect of a corresponding change 
in the nature of their intellectual operations, of a 
change by which science gains and poetry loses. 
Generalization is necessary to the advancement of 
knoAvledge; but particularity is indispensable to the 
creations of the imagination. In proportion as men 
know more and think more, they look less at indi- 
viduals and more at classes. They therefore make 
better theories and worse poems. They give us vague lo 
phrases instead of images, and personified qualities 
instead of men. They may be better able to analyze 
human nature than their predecessors. But analysis 
is not the business of the poet. His office is to por- 
tray, not to dissect. He may believe in a moral sense, 
like Shaftesbury; ° he may refer all human actions to 
self-interest, like Helvetius ; ° or he may never think 
about the matter at all. His creed on such subjects 
will no more influence his poetry, properly so called, 
than the notions which a painter may have conceived 20 
respecting the laclirymal glands, or the circulation of 
the blood, will affect the tears of his ]Sriobe,° or the 
blushes of his Aurora. ° If Shakespeare had written 
a book on the motives of human actions, it is by no 
means certain that it would have been a good one. It 



10 MILTON 

is extremely improbable that it would have contained 
half so much able reasoning on the subject as is to be 
found in the Fable of the Bees. But could Mande- 
ville° have created an Iago?° Well as he knew how 
to resolve characters into their elements, would he 
have been able to combine those elements in such a 
manner as to make up a man, a real, living, individual 
man? 

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy 

lo poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind, if any 
thing which gives so much pleasure ought to be called 
unsoundness. By poetry we mean not all writing in 
verse, nor even all good writing in verse. Our defini- 
tion excludes many metrical compositions which, on 
other grounds, deserve the highest praise. By poetry 
we mean the art of employing words in such a manner 
as to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art 
of doing by means of words what the painter does by 
means of colors. Thus the greatest of poets has 

20 described it, in lines universally admired for the vigor 
and felicity of their diction, and still more valuable 
on account of the just notion which they convey of 
the art in which he excelled: 

" As imagination bodies forth 
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen 



MILTON 11 

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing 
A local habitation and a name."° 

These are the fruits of the " fine frenzy " which he 
ascribes to the poet, — a fine frenzy doubtless, but 
still a frenzy. Truth, indeed, is essential to poetry; 
but it is the truth of madness. The reasonings are 
just; but the premises are false. After the first sup- 
positions have been made, everything ought to be 
consistent; but those first suppositions require a 
degree of credulity which almost amounts to a partial lo 
and temporary derangement of the intellect. Hence 
of all people children are the most imaginative. They 
abandon themselves without reserve to every illusion. 
Every image which is strongly presented to their 
mental eye produces on them the effect of reality. 
No man, whatever his sensibility may be, is ever 
affected by Hamlet or Lear, as a little girl is affected 
by the story of poor Eed Eiding-hood. She knows 
that it is all false, that wolves cannot speak, that 
there are no wolves in England. Yet in spite of her 20 
knowledge she believes; she weeps; she trembles; 
she dares not go into a dark room lest she should feel 
the teeth of the monster at her throat. Such is the 
despotism of the imagination over uncultivated minds. 

In a rude state of society men are children with a 



12 MILT ox 

greater variety of ideas. It is therefore in sucli a 
state of society that we may expect to find the poeti- 
cal temperament in its highest perfection. In an 
enlightened age there will be much intelligence, much 
science, much philosophy, abundance of just classifica- 
tion and subtle analysis, abundance of wit and elo- 
quence, abundance of verses, and even of good ones; 
but little poetry. Men will judge and compare; but 
they will not create. They will talk about the old 

10 poets, and comment on them, and to a certain degree 
enjoy them. But they will scarcely be able to con- 
ceive the effect which poetry produced on their ruder 
ancestors, the agony, the ecstasy, the plenitude of 
belief. The Greek Khapsodists,° according to Plato, 
could scarce recite Homer without falling into con- 
vulsions. The Mohawk hardly feels the scalping- 
knife while he shouts his death-song. The power 
which the ancient bards of Wales and Germany exer- 
cised over their auditors seems to modern readers 

20 almost miraculous. Such feelings are very rare in a 
civilized community, and most rare among those who 
participate most in its improvements. They linger 
longest among the peasantry. 

Poetry produces an illusion on the eye of the mind, 
as a magic lantern produces an illusion on the eye of 



MILTON 13 

the body. And, as the magic lantern acts best in 
a dark room, poetry effects its purpose most com- 
pletely in a dark age. As the light of knowledge 
breaks in upon its exhibitions, as the outlines of cer- 
tainty become more and more definite, and the shades 
of probability more and more distinct, the hues and 
lineaments of the phantoms which the poet calls up 
grow fainter and fainter. We cannot unite the in- 
compatible advantages of reality and deception, the 
clear discernment of truth and the exquisite enjoy- lo 
ment of fiction. ° 

He who, in an enlightened and literary society, 
aspires to be a great poet, must first become a little 
child. He must take to pieces the whole web of his 
mind. He must unlearn much of that knowledge 
which has perhaps constituted hitherto his chief title 
to superiority. His very talents will be a hindrance 
to him. His difficulties will be proportioned to his 
proficiency in the pursuits which are fashionable 
among his contemporaries; and that proficiency will 20 
in general be proportioned to the vigor and activity 
of his mind. And it is well if, after all his sacrifices 
and exertions, his works do not resemble a lisping 
man or a modern ruin. We have seen in our own time 
great talents, intense labor, and long meditation em- 



U MILTON 

ployed in this struggle against the spirit of the age, 
and employed, we will not say, absolutely in vain, 
but with dubious success and feeble applause. 

If these reasonings be just, no poet has ever tri- 
umphed over greater difficulties than Milton. He 
received a learned education; he was a profound and 
elegant classical scholar; he had studied all the mys- 
teries of Rabbinical ° literature; he was intimately 
acquainted with every language of modern Europe, 

10 from which either pleasure or information was then 
to be derived. He was perhaps the only great poet 
of later times who has been distinguished by the ex- 
cellence of his Latin verse. The genius of Petrarch ° 
was scarcely of the first order; and his poems in the 
ancient language, though much praised by those who 
have never read them, are wretched compositions. 
Cowley, ° with all his admirable wit and ingenuity, 
had little imagination; nor, indeed, do we think his 
classical diction comparable to that of Milton. The 

20 authority of Johnson ° is against us on this point. But 
Johnson had studied the bad writers of the Middle 
Ages till he had become utterly insensible to the 
Augustan elegance, and was as ill qualified to judge 
between two Latin styles as an habitual drunkard to 
set up for a wine-taster. 



MILTOX 15 

Versification in a dead language is an exotic, a far- 
fetched, costly, sickly imitation of that which else- 
where may be found in healthful and spontaneous 
perfection. The soils on which this rarity flourishes 
are in general as ill-suited to the production of vigor- 
ous native poetry as the flower-pots of a hothouse to 
the growth of oaks. That the author of the Paradise 
Lost should have written the Epistle to Manso ° was 
truly wonderful. Never before were such marked 
originality and such exquisite mimicry found together. : 
Indeed in all the Latin poems of Milton the artificial 
manner indispensable to such works is admirably pre- 
served, while, at the same time, his genius gives to 
them a peculiar charm, an air of nobleness and free- 
dom, which distinguishes them from all other writings 
of the same class. They remind us of the amuse- 
ments of those angelic warriors who composed the 
cohort of Gabriel : 

" About him exercised heroic games 
The unarmed youth of heaven. But o'er their heads ^ 

Celestial armory, shield, helm, and spear, 
Hung high, with diamond flaming and with gold." ° 

We cannot look upon the sportive exercises for which 
the genius of Milton ungirds itself, without catching 



IG MILTON 

a glimpse of the gorgeous and terrible panoply which 
it is accustomed to wear. The strength of his im- 
agination triumphed over every obstacle. So intense 
and ardent was the fire of his mind, that it not only 
was not suffocated beneath the weight of fuel, but 
penetrated the Avhole superincumbent mass with its 
own heart and radiance. 

It is not our intention to attempt anything like a 
complete examination of the poetry of Milton. The 

10 public has long been agreed as to the merit of the 
most remarkable passages, the incomparable harmony 
of the numbers, and the excellence of that style, which 
no rival has been able to equal, and no parodist to 
degrade, which displays in their highest perfection 
the idiomatic powers of the English tongue, and to 
which every ancient and every modern language has 
contributed something of grace, of energy, or of music. 
In the vast field of criticism on which we are entering 
innumerable reapers have already put their sickles. 

20 Yet the harvest is so abundant that the negligent 
search of a straggling gleaner may be rewarded with 
a sheaf. 

The most striking characteristic of the poetry of 
Milton is the extreme remoteness of the associations 
by means of which it acts on the reader. Its effect is 



MILTON 17 

produced, not so mucli by what it expresses, as by 
what it suggests; not so much by the ideas which it 
directly conveys, as by other ideas which are con- 
nected with them. He electrifies the mind through 
conductors. The most unimaginative man must un- 
derstand the Iliad. Homer gives him no choice, and 
requires from him no exertion, but takes the whole 
upon himself, and sets the images in so clear a light 
that it is impossible to be blind to them. The works 
of Milton cannot be comprehended or enjoyed, unless lo 
the mind of the reader cooperate with that of the 
writer. He does not paint a finished picture, or play 
for a mere passive listener. He sketches, and leaves 
others to fill up the outline. He strikes the key-note, 
and expects his hearer to make out the melody. 

We often hear of the magical influence of poetry. 
The expression in general means nothing; but, applied 
to the writings of Milton, it is most appropriate. His 
poetry acts like an incantation. Its merit lies less in 
its obvious meaning than in its occult power. There 20 
would seem, at first sight, to be no more in his words 
than in other words. But they are words of enchant- 
ment. No sooner are they pronounced, than the past 
is present and the distant near. New forms of beauty 
start at once into existence, and all the burial-places 



18 MILT ox 

of the memory give up their dead. Change the 
- structure of the sentence, substitute one synonyme 
for another, and the whole effect is destroyed. The 
spell loses its power; and he who should then hope to 
conjure with it would find himself as much mistaken 
as Cassim° in the Arabian tale, when he stood crying, 
"Open Wheat," "Open Barley," to the door which 
obeyed no sound but " Open Sesame." The miserable 
failure of Dryden° in his attempt to translate into his 
loown diction some part of the Paradise Lost, is a 
remarkable instance of this. 

In support of these observations we may remark, 
that scarcely any passages in the poems of Milton are 
more generally known or more frequently repeated 
than those which are little more than muster-rolls of 
names. ° They are not always more appropriate or 
more melodious tlian other names. But they are 
charmed names. Every one of them is the first link 
in a long chain of associated ideas. Like the dwell- 
2oing-place of our infancy revisited in manhood, like 
the song of our country heard in a strange land, they 
produce upon us an effect wholly independent of their 
intrinsic value. One transports us back to a remote 
period of history. Another j^laces us among the 
novel scenes and manners of a distant region. A 



MILTON 19 

third evokes all the dear classical recollections of 
childhood, the schoolroom, the dog-eared Virgil, the 
holiday, and the prize. A fourth brings before us 
the splendid phantoms of chivalrous romance, the 
trophied lists, the embroidered housings, the quaint 
devices, the haunted forests, the enchanted gardens, 
the achievements of enamored knights, and the smiles 
of rescued princesses. 

In none of the works of Milton is his peculiar 
manner more happily displayed than in Allegro and lo 
the Penseroso. It is impossible to conceive that the 
mechanism of language can be brought to a more ex- 
quisite degree of perfection. These poems differ from 
others as attar of roses differs from ordinary rose- 
water, the close packed essence from the thin diluted 
mixture. They are indeed not so much poems, as col- 
lections of hints, from each of which the reader is to 
make out a poem for himself. Every epithet is a text 
for a stanza. 

The Comus and the Samson Agonistes are works 20 
which, though of very different merit, offer some 
marked points of resemblance. Both are lyric poems 
in the form of plays. There are perhaps no two kinds 
of composition so essentially dissimilar as the drama 
and the ode. The business of the dramatist is to keep 



20 MILTON 

liimself out of siglit, and to let nothing appear but his 
characters. As soon as he attracts notice to his per- 
sonal feelings, the illusion is broken. The effect is 
as unpleasant as that which is produced on the stage 
by the voice of a prompter or tlie entrance of a scene- 
shifter. Hence it was, that the tragedies of Byron ° 
were his least successful performances. They resem- 
ble those pasteboard pictures invented by the friend 
of children, Mr. Newbury, in which a single movable 

10 head goes round twenty different bodies, so that the 
same face looks out upon us successively, from the 
uniform of a hussar, the furs of a judge, and the rags 
of a beggar. In all the characters, patriots and ty- 
rants, haters and lovers, the frown and sneer of 
Harold ° were discernible in an instant. But this spe- 
cies of egotism, though fatal to the drama, is the in- 
spiration of the ode. It is the part of the lyric poet 
to abandon liimself, without reserve, to his own 
emotion. 

20 Between these hostile elements many great men 
have endeavored to effect an amalgamation, but never 
with complete success. The Greek Drama, on the 
model of which the Samson was written, sprang from 
the Ode. The dialogue was ingrafted on the chorus, 
and naturally partook of its character. The genius 



MILTON 21 

of the greatest of the Athenian dramatists cooperated 
with the circumstances under which tragedy made its 
first appearance, ^schylus ° was, head and heart, a 
lyric poet. In his time, the Greeks had far more in- 
tercourse with the East than in the days of Homer, 
and they had not yet acquired that immense superi- 
ority in war, in science, and in the arts, wliich, in the 
following generation, led them to treat the Asiatics 
with contempt. From the narrative of Herodotus ° it 
should seem that they still looked up, with the dis- lo 
ciples, to Egypt and Assyria. At this period, accord- 
ingly, it was natural that the literature of Greece 
should be tinctured with the Oriental style. And 
that style, we think, is discernible in the works of 
Pindar ° and ^schylus. The latter often reminds us 
of the Hebrew writers. The book of Job, indeed, in 
conduct and diction, bears a considerable resemblance 
to some of his dramas. Considered as plays, his 
works are absurd; considered as choruses, they are 
above all praise. If, for instance, we examine the 20 
address of Clytemnestra to Agamemnon on his re- 
turn, or the description of the seven Argive chiefs, 
by the principles of dramatic writing, we shall in- 
stantly condemn them as monstrous. But if we for- 
get the characters, and think only of the poetry, we 



22 MILTON 

shall admit that it has never been surpassed in energy 
and magnificence. Sophocles ° made the Greek drama 
as dramatic as was consistent with its original form. 
His portraits of men have a sort of similarity; but it 
is the similarity not of a painting, but of abas-relief. 
It suggests a resemblance ; but it does not produce an 
illusion. Euripides ° attempted to carry the reform 
further. But it was a task far beyond his powers, 
perhaps beyond any powers. Instead of correcting 

10 what was bad, he destroyed what was excellent. He 
substituted crutches for stilts, bad sermons for good 
odes. 

Milton, it is well known, admired Euripides highly, 
much more highly than, in our opinion, Euripides 
deserved. Indeed, the caresses which this partiality 
leads our countryman to bestow on "sad Electra's 
poet," sometimes remind us of the beautiful Queen of 
Fairyland kissing the long ears of Bottom. ° At all 
events, there can be no doubt that this veneration for 

20 the Athenian, whether just or not, was injurious to 
the Samson Agonistes. Had Milton taken ^schylus 
for his model, he would have given himself up to the 
lyric inspiration, and poured out profusely all the 
treasures of his mind, without bestowing a thought on 
tliose dramatic proprieties which the nature of the 



MILTOX 23 

work rendered it impossible to preserve. In the 
attempt to reconcile things in their own nature incon- 
sistent, he has failed, as every one else must have 
failed. AVe cannot identify ourselves with the char- 
acters, as in a good play. We cannot identify our- 
selves with the poet, as in a good ode. The conflicting 
ingredients, like an acid and an alkali mixed, neutral- 
ize each other. We are by no means insensible to the 
merits of this celebrated piece, to the severe dignity 
of the style, the graceful and pathetic solemnity of lo 
the opening speech, or the wild and barbaric melody 
which gives so striking an effect to the choral pas- 
sages. But we think it, we confess, the least success- 
ful effort of the genius of Milton. 

The Comus is framed on the model of the Italian 
Masque, ° as the Samson is framed on the model of the 
Greek Tragedy. It is certainly the noblest perform- 
ance of the kind which exists in any language. It is 
as far superior to the Faithful Shepherdess, ° as the 
Faithful Shepherdess is to the Aminta,° or the Aminta 20 
to the Pastor Fido.° It was well for Milton that he 
had here no Euripides to mislead him. He under- 
stood and loved the literature of modern Italy. But 
he did not feel for it the same veneration which he 
entertained for the remains of Athenian and Eoman 



24 MILTON 

poetry, consecrated by so many lofty and endearing 
recollections. The faults, moreover, of his Italian 
predecessors were of a kind to which his mind had a 
deadly antipathy. He could stoop to a plain style, 
sometimes even to a bald style ; but false brilliancy 
was his utter aversion. His muse had no objection 
to a russet attire ; but she turned with disgust from 
the finery of Guarini, as tawdry and as paltry as the 
rags of a chimney-sweeper on May-day. Whatever 

10 ornaments she wears are of massive gold, not only 
dazzling to the sight, but capable of standing the 
severest test of the crucible. 

Milton attended in the Comus to the distinction 
which he afterwards neglected in the Samson. He 
made his Masque what it ought to be, essentially 
lyrical, and dramatic only in semblance. He has not 
attempted a fruitless struggle against a defect inher- 
ent in the nature of that species of composition ; and 
he has therefore succeeded, wherever success was not 

20 impossible. The speeches must be read as majestic 
soliloquies ; and he who so reads them will be enrapt- 
ured with their eloquence, their sublimity, and their 
music. The interruptions of the dialogue, however, 
impose a constraint upon the writer, and break the 
illusion of the reader. The finest passages are those 



MILTON 25 

which are lyric in form as well as in spirit. " I should 
much commend," says the excellent Sir Henry Wot- 
ton ° in a letter to Milton, " the tragical part if the 
lyrical did not ravish me with a certain Dorique 
delicacy in your songs and odes, whereunto, I must 
plainly confess to you, I have seen yet nothing par- 
allel in our language." The criticism was just. It 
is when Milton escapes from the shackles of the dia- 
logue, when he is discharged from the labor of uniting 
two incongruous styles, when he is at liberty to indulge lo 
his choral raptures without reserve, that he rises even 
above himself. Then, like his own good Genius 
bursting from the earthly form and weeds of Thyrsis,° 
he stands forth in celestial freedom and beauty; he 
seems to cry exultingly, 

" Now my task is smoothly done, 
I can fly or I can run," 

to skim the earth, to soar above the clouds, to bathe 
in the Elysian dew of the rainbow, and to inhale the 
balmy smells of nard and cassia, which the musky 20 
winds of the zephyr scatter through the cedared alleys 
of the Hesperides.° 

There are several of the minor poems of Milton on 
which we would willingly make a few remarks. Still 



26 MILTON 

more willingly would we enter into a detailed examina- 
tion of that admirable poem, the Paradise Eegained, 
which, strangely enough, is scarcely ever mentioned 
except as an instance of the blindness of the parental 
affection which men of letters bear towards the off- 
spring of their intellects. That Milton was mistaken 
in preferring this work, excellent as it is, to the Para- 
dise Lost, we readily admit. But we are sure that 
the superiority of the Paradise Lost to the Paradise 

10 Regained is not more decided, than the superiority of 
the Paradise Regained to every poem which has since 
made its appearance. Our limits, however, prevent 
us from discussing the point at length. We hasten 
on to that extraordinary production which the general 
suffrage of critics has placed in the highest class of 
human compositions. 

The only poem of modern times which can be com- 
pared with the Paradise Lost is the Divine Comedy. ° 
The subject of Milton, in some points, resembled that 

20 of Dante; but he has treated it in a widely different 
manner. We cannot, we think, better illustrate our 
opinion respecting our own great poet than by con- 
trasting him with the father of Tuscan literature. 

The poetry of Milton differs from that of Dante, as 
the hieroglyphics of Egypt differed from the picture- 



MILT ox 27 

writing of Mexico. The images which Dante em- 
ploys speak for themselves; they stand simply for 
what they are. Those of Milton have a signification 
which is often discernible only to the initiated. Their 
value depends less on what they directly represent 
than on what they remotely suggest. However 
strange, however grotesque, may be the appearance 
which Dante undertakes to describe, he never shrinks 
from describing it. He gives us the shape, the color, 
the sound, the smell, the taste ; he counts the num- lo 
bers; he measures the size. His similes are the illus- 
trations of a traveller. Unlike those of other poets, 
and especially of Milton, they are introduced in a 
plain, business-like manner; not for the sake of any 
beauty in the objects from which they are drawn, not 
for the sake of any ornament which they may impart 
to the poem; but simply in order to make the mean- 
ing of the writer as clear to the reader as it is to him- 
self. The ruins of the precipice which led from the 
sixth to the seventh circle of hell were like those of 20 
the rock which fell into the Adige ° on the south 
of Trent.° The cataract of Phlegethon° was like that 
of Aqua Cheta° at the monastery of St. Benedict. ° 
The place where the heretics were confined in burn- 
ing tombs resembled the vast cemetery of Aries. ° 



28 MILTON 

ISTow let us compare with the exact details of Dante 
the dim intimations of Milton. We will cite a few 
examples. The English poet has never thought of 
taking the measure of Satan. He gives us merely a 
vague idea of vast bulk. In one passage the fiend 
lies stretched out huge in length, ° floating many a 
rood, equal in size to the earth-born enemies of Jove, 
or to the sea-mouster which the mariner mistakes for 
an island. When he addresses himself to battle 

10 against the guardian angels, ° he stands like Teneriffe 
or Atlas ; his stature reaches the sky. Contrast with 
these descriptions the lines in which Dante has de- 
scribed the gigantic spectre of ]S"imrod.° "His face 
seemed to me as long and as broad as the ball of St. 
Peter's at Rome; and his other limbs were in propor- 
tion ; so that the bank, which concealed him from the 
waist downwards, nevertheless showed so much of 
him that three tall Germans would in vain have at- 
tempted to reach to his hair." We are sensible that 

-^o we do no justice to the admirable style of the Floren- 
tine poet. But Mr. Gary's translation is not at 
hand; and our version, however rude, is sufficient to 
illustrate our meaniug. 

Once more, compare the lazar-house ° in the eleventh 
book of the Paradise Lost with the last ward of Male- 



MILTON 29 

bolge ° in Dante. Milton avoids the loathsome de- 
tails, and takes refuge in indistinct but solemn and 
tremendous imagery, Despair hurrying from couch to 
couch to mock the wretches with his attendance, 
Death shaking his dart over them, but, in spite of 
supplications, delaying to strike. What says Dante? 
"There was such a moan there as there would be if 
all the sick who, between July and September, are in 
the hospitals of Valdichiana,° and of the Tuscan' 
swamps, and of Sardinia, were in one pit together; lo 
and such a stench was issuing forth as is wont to 
issue from decayed limbs." 

We will not take upon ourselves the invidious office 
of settling precedency between two such writers. 
Each in his own department is incomparable; and 
each, we may remark, has wisely, or fortunately, taken 
a subject adapted to exhibit his peculiar talent to the 
greatest advantage. The Divine Comedy is a personal 
narrative. Dante is the eye-witness and ear-witness 
of that which he relates. He is the very man who 20 
has heard the tormented spirits ° crying out for the 
second death, who has read the dusky characters on 
the portal within which there is no hope,° who has 
hidden his face from the terrors of the Gorgon, ° who 
has fled from the hooks and the seething pitch of Bar- 



30 MILTON 

bariccia° and Draghignazzo.° His own hands have 
grasped the shaggy sides of Lucifer. ° His own feet 
have climbed the mountain of expiation. ° His own 
brow has been marked by the purifying angel. ° The 
reader would throw aside such a tale in incredulous 
disgust, unless it were told with the strongest air of 
veracity, with a sobriety even in its horrors, with the 
greatest precision and multiplicity in its details. The 
narrative of Milton in this respect differs from that 

10 of Dante, as the adventures of Amadis ° differ from 
those of Gulliver. ° The author of Amadis would 
have made his book ridiculous if he had introduced 
those minute particulars which give such a charm to 
the work of Swift, the nautical observations, the 
affected delicacy about names, the official documents 
transcribed at full length, and all the unmeaning gos- 
sip and scandal of the court, springing out of noth- 
ing, and tending to nothing. We are not shocked 
at being told that a man who lived, nobody knows 

20 when, saw many very strange sights, and we 
can easily abandon ourselves to the illusion of the 
romance. But when Lemuel Gulliver, surgeon, 
resident at Rotherhithe, tells us of pygmies and 
giants, dying islands, and philosophizing horses, 
nothing but such circumstantial touches could pro- 



MILTOX 31 

diice for a single moment a deception on the imagi- 
nation. 

Of all the poets who have introduced into their 
works the agency of supernatural beings, Milton has 
succeeded best. Here Dante decidedly yields to him ; 
and as this is a point on which many rash and ill- 
considered judgments have been pronounced, we feel 
inclined to dwell on it a little longer. The most fatal 
error which a poet can possibly commit in the manage- 
ment of his machinery, is that of attempting to phi- lo 
losophize too much. Milton has been often censured 
for ascribing to spirits many functions of which spir- 
its must be incapable. But these objections, though 
sanctioned by eminent names, originate, we venture to 
say, in profound ignorance of the art of poetry. 

What is spirit? What are our own minds, the 
portion of spirit with which we are best acquainted? 
We observe certain phenomena. We cannot explain 
them into material causes. We therefore infer that 
there exists something which is not material. But 20 
of this something we have no idea. We can define it 
only by negatives. We can reason about it only by 
symbols. We use the word, but we have no image 
of the thing; and the business of poetry is with 
images, and not with words. The poet uses words 



32 MILTON 

indeed; but they are merely the instruments of his 
art, not its objects. They are the materials which 
he is to dispose in such a manner as to present a pict- 
ure to the mental eye. And if they are not so dis- 
posed, they are no more entitled to be called poetry 
than a bale of canvas and a box of colors to be called 
a painting. 

► Logicians may reason about abstractions. But the 
great mass of men must have images. The strong 

10 tendency of the multitude in all ages and nations to 
idolatry can be explained on no other principle. The 
first inhabitants of Greece, there is reason to believe, 
worshipped one invisible Deity. ° But the necessity of 
having something more definite to adore produced, in 
a few centuries, the innumerable crowd of Gods and 
Goddesses. In like manner the ancient Persians 
thought it impious to exhibit the Creator under a 
human form. Yet even these transferred to the Sun 
the worship which, in speculation, they considered 

20 due only to the Supreme Mind. The history of the 
Jews is the record of a continued struggle between 
pure Theism, supported by the most terrible sanctions, 
and the strangely fascinating desire of having some 
visible and tangible object of adoration. Perhaps 
none of the secondary causes which Gibbon ° has as- 



MILTON 33 

signed for tlie rapidity with which Christianity- 
spread over the world, while Judaism scarcely ever 
acquired a proselyte, operated more powerfully than 
this feeling. God, the uncreated, the incomprehen- 
sible, the invisible, attracted few worshippers. A 
philosopher might admire so noble a conception; but 
the crowd turned away in disgust from words which 
presented no image to their minds. It was before 
Deity embodied in a human form, walking among 
men, partaking of their infirmities, leaning on their lo 
bosoms, weeping over their graves, slumbering in the 
manger, bleeding on the cross, that the prejudices of 
the Synagogue, ° and the doubts of the Academy, ° and 
the pride of the Portico, ° and the fasces of the Lictor,° 
and the swords of thirty legions, were humbled in 
the dust. Soon after Christianity had achieved its 
triumph, the principle which had assisted it began to 
corrupt it. It became a new Paganism. Patron 
saints assumed the offices of household gods. St. 
George ° took the place of Mars. St. Elmo ° consoled 20 
the mariner for the loss of Castor and Pollux. The 
Virgin Mother and Cecilia ° succeeded to Venus and 
the Muses. The fascination of sex and loveliness 
was again joined to that of celestial dignity ; and the 
homage of chivalry was blended with that of religion. 



34 MiLToy 

Keformers have often made a stand against these feel- 
ings ; but never with more than apparent and partial 
success. The men who demolished the images in 
Cathedrals ° have not always been able to demolish 
those which were enshrined in their minds. It would 
not be difficult to show that in politics the same rule 
holds good. Doctrines, Ave are afraid, must generally 
be embodied before they can excite a strong public 
feeling. The multitude is more easily interested for 

10 the most unmeaning badge, or the most insignificant 
name, than for the most important principle. 

From these considerations, we infer that no poet, 
who should affect that metaphysical accuracy for the 
want of which Milton has been blamed, would escape 
a disgraceful failure. Still, however, there was 
another extreme, which, though far less dangerous, 
was also to be avoided. The imaginations of men are 
in a great measure under the control of their opinions. 
The most exquisite art of poetical coloring can pro- 

2oduce no illusion, when it is employed to represent 
that which is at once perceived to be incongruous and 
absurd. Milton wrote in an age of philosophers and 
theologians. It was necessary, therefore, for him to 
abstain from giving such a shock to their understand- 
ings as might break the charm which it was his object 



MILTON 35 

to throw over their imaginations. This is the real 
explanation of the indistinctness and inconsistency 
Avith which he has often been reproached. Dr. John- 
son acknowledges that it was absolutely necessary that 
the spirit should be clothed with material forms. 
"But," says he, "the poet should have secured the 
consistency of his system by keeping immateriality 
out of sight, and seducing the reader to drop it from 
his thoughts." This is easily said; but what if Milton 
could not seduce his readers to drop immateriality lo 
from their thoughts? What if the contrary opinion 
had taken so fully possession of the minds of men as 
to leave no room even for the half belief which poetry 
requires? Such we suspect to have been the case. It 
was impossible for the poet to adopt altogether the 
material or the immaterial system. He therefore took 
his stand on the debatable ground. He left the whole 
in ambiguity. He has, doubtless, by so doing, laid 
himself open to the charge of inconsistency. But, 
though philosophically in the wrong, we cannot but 20 
believe that he was poetically in the right. This task, 
which almost any other writer would have found im- 
practicable, was easy to him. The peculiar art which 
he possessed of communicating his meaning circui- 
tously through a long succession of associated ideas, 



36 MILTON 

and of intimating more than he expressed, enabled 
him to disguise those incongruities which he could 
not avoid. 

Poetry which relates to the beings of another world 
ouglit to be at once mysterious and picturesque. That 
of Milton is so. That of Dante is picturesque indeed 
beyond any that was ever written. Its effect ap- 
proaches to that produced b}^ the pencil or the chisel. 
But it is picturesque to the exclusion of all mystery. 

lo This is a fault on the right side, a fault inseparable 
from the plan of Dante's poem, which, as we have 
already observed, rendered the utmost accuracy of 
description necessary. Still it is a fault. The su- 
pernatural agents excite an interest; but it is not the 
interest which is proper to supernatural agents. AVe 
feel that we could talk to the ghosts and demons 
without any emotion of unearthly aw^e. We could, 
like Don Juan,° ask them to supper, and eat heartily 
in their company. Dante's angels are good men with 

sowings. His devils are spiteful ugly executioners. 
His dead men are merely living men in strange situa- 
tions. The scene which passes between the poet and 
Farinata ° is justly celebrated. Still, Farinata in the 
burning tomb is exactly what Farinata would have 
been at an auto clafe.° Nothing can be more touching 



MILTON 37 

than the first interview of Dante and Beatrice. ° Yet 
what is it, but a lovely woman chiding, with sweet 
austere composure, the lover for whose affection she 
is grateful, but whose vices she reprobates? The feel- 
ings which give the passage its charm would suit the 
streets of Florence as well as the summit of the 
Mount of Purgatory, ° 

The spirits of Milton are unlike those of almost all 
other writers. His fiends, in particular, are wonder- 
ful creations. They are not metaphysical abstrac- lo 
tions. They are not wicked men. They are not ugly 
beasts. They have no horns, no tails, none of the 
fee-faw-fum of Tasso° and Klopstock.° They have 
just enough in common with human nature to be intel- 
ligible to human beings. Their characters are, like 
their forms, marked by a certain dim resemblance to 
those of men, but exaggerated to gigantic dimensions, 
and veiled in mysterious gloom. 

Perhaps the gods and demons of ^schylus may 
best bear a comparison with the angels and devils of 20 
Milton. The style of the Athenian had, as we have 
remarked, something of the Oriental character; and 
the same peculiarity may be traced in his mythology. 
It has nothing of the amenity and elegance which we 
generally find in the superstitions of Greece. All is 



38 MILTON 

rugged, barbaric, and colossal. The legends of ^s- 
cliylus seem to harmonize less with the fragrant groves 
and graceful porticos in which his countrymen paid 
their vows to the God of Light and Goddess of 
Desire, than with those huge and grotesque laby- 
rinths of eternal granite in which Egypt enshrined 
her mystic Osiris, or in which Hindostan still bows 
down to her seven-headed idols. His favorite gods 
are those of the elder generation, the sons of heaven 

10 and earth, compared with whom Jupiter himself was 
a stripling and an upstart, the gigantic Titans, and 
the inexorable Furies. Foremost among his crea- 
tions of this class stands Prometheus, ° half fiend, 
half redeemer, the friend of man, the sullen and im- 
placable enemy of heaven. Prometheus bears un- 
doubtedly a considerable resemblance to the Satan of 
Milton. In both we find the same impatience of con- 
trol, the same ferocity, the same unconquerable pride. 
In both characters also are mingled, though in very 

20 different proportions, some kind and generous feel- 
ings. Prometheus, however, is hardly superhuman 
enough. He talks too much of his chains and his 
uneasy posture : he is rather too much depressed and 
agitated. His resolution seems to depend on the 
knowledge whicb he possesses that he holds the fate 



MILTON 39 

of his torturer in his hands, and that the hour of his 
release will surely come. But Satan is a creature of 
another sphere. The might of his intellectual nature 
is victorious over the extremity of pain. Amidst 
agonies which cannot be conceived without horror, he 
deliberates, resolves, and even exults. Against the 
sword of Michael, against the thunder of Jehovah, 
against the flaming lake, and the marl burning with 
solid fire, against the prospect of an eternity of unin- 
termitted misery, his spirit bears up unbroken, rest- lo 
ing on its own innate energies, requiring no support 
from anything external, nor even from hope itself. 

To return for a moment to the parallel Avhich we 
have been attempting to draw between Milton and 
Dante, we would add that the poetry of these great 
men has in a considerable degree taken its character 
from their moral qualities. They are not egotists. 
They rarely obtrude their idiosyncrasies on their 
readers. They have nothing in common with those 
modern beggars for fame, who extort a pittance from 20 
the compassion of the inexperienced by exposing the 
nakedness and sores of their minds. Yet it would be 
difficult to name two writers whose works have been 
more completely, though undesignedly, colored by 
their personal feelings. 



40 MILTON 

The character of Milton was peculiarly distinguished 
by loftiness of spirit; that of Dante by intensity of 
feeling. In every line of the Divine Comedy we dis- 
cern the asperity which is produced by pride strug- 
gling with misery. There is perhaps no work in the 
world so deeply and uniformly sorrowful. The mel- 
ancholy of Dante was no fantastic caprice. It was 
not, as far as at this distance of time can be judged, 
the effect of external circumstances. It was from 

lo within. Neither love nor glory, neither the conflicts 
of earth nor the hope of heaven, could dispel it. It 
turned every consolation and every pleasure into its 
own nature. It resembled that noxious Sardinian 
soil of which the intense bitterness is said to have 
been perceptible even in its honey. His mind was, 
in the noble language of the Hebrew poet, " a land of 
darkness, as darkness itself, and where the light was 
as darkness." ° The gloom of his characters discolors 
all the passions of men, and all the face of nature, 

20 and tinges with its own livid hue the flowers of Para- 
dise and the glories of the eternal throne. All the 
portraits of him are singularly characteristic. No 
person can look on the features, noble even to rugged- 
ness, the dark furrows of the cheek, the haggard and 
woful stare of the eye, the sullen and contemptuous 



MILTON 41 

curve of the lip, and doubt that they belong to a man 
too proud and too sensitive to be happy. 

Milton was, like Dante, a statesman and a lover; 
and, like Dante, he had been unfortunate in ambition 
and in love. He had survived his health and his 
sight, the comforts of his home, and the prosperity of 
his party. Of the great men by whom he had been 
distinguished at his entrance into life, some had been 
taken away from the evil to come ; some had carried 
into foreign climates their unconquerable hatred of lo 
oppression; some were pining in dungeons; and some 
had poured forth their blood on scaffolds. Venal 
and licentious scribblers, with just sufficient talent 
to clothe the thoughts of a pandar in the style of a 
bellman, were now the favorite writers of the Sov- 
ereign and of the public. It was a loathsome herd, 
which could be compared to nothing so fitly as to the 
rabble of Comus, grotesque monsters, half bestial, 
half human, dropping with wine, bloated with glut- 
tony, and reeling in obscene dances. Amidst these 20 
that fair Muse was placed, like the chaste lady of the 
Masque, lofty, spotless, and serene, to be chattered 
at, and pointed at, and grinned at, by the whole rout 
of Satyrs and Goblins. If ever despondency and as- 
perity could be excused in any man, they might have - 



42 MILTOX 

been excused in Milton. But the strength of his 
mind overcame every calamit3^ Neither blindness, 
nor gout, nor age, nor penury, nor domestic afflic- 
tions, nor political disappointments, nor abuse, nor 
proscription, nor neglect, had power to disturb his 
sedate and majestic patience. His spirits do not seem 
to have been high, but they were singularly equable. 
His temper was serious, perhaps stern; but it was a 
temper which no sufferings could render sullen or 

10 fretful. Such as it was when, on the eve of great 
events, he returned from his travels, in the prime of 
health and manly beauty, loaded with literary distinc- 
tions, and glowing with patriotic hopes, such it con- 
tinued to be when, after having experienced every 
calamity which is incident to our nature, old, poor, 
sightless, and disgraced, he retired to his hovel to die. 
Hence it was that, though he wrote the Paradise 
Lost at a time of life when images of beauty and ten- 
derness are in general beginning to fade, even from 

20 those minds in which they have not been effaced by 
anxiety and disappointment, he adorned it with all 
that is most lovely and delightful in the physical and 
in the moral world. jSTeither Theocritus ° nor Ariosto ° 
had a finer or a more healthful sense of the pleasant- 
ness of external objects, or loved better to luxuriate 



MILTON 43 

amidst sunbeams and flowers, the songs of nightin- 
gales, the juice of summer fruits, and the coolness of 
shady fountains. His conception of love unites all 
the voluptuousness of the Oriental harem, and all the 
gallantry of the chivalric tournament, with all the 
pure and quiet affection of an English fireside. His 
poetry reminds us of the miracles of Alpine scenery. 
Nooks and dells, beautiful as fairyland, are embos- 
omed in its most rugged and gigantic elevations. The 
roses and myrtles bloom unchilled on the verge of the lo 
avalanche. 

Traces, indeed, of the peculiar character of Milton 
may be found in all his works ; but it is most strongly 
displayed in the Sonnets. ° Those remarkable poems 
have been undervalued by critics who have not un- 
derstood their nature. They have no epigrammatic 
point. There is none of the ingenuity of Filicaja ° in 
the thought, none of the hard and brilliant enamel of 
Petrarch ° in the style. They are simple but majestic 
records of the feelings of the poet; as little tricked 20 
out for the public eye as his diary would have been. 
A victory, an expected attack upon the city, a mo- 
mentary lit of depression or exultation, a jest thrown 
out against one of his books, a dream which for a 
short time restored to him that beautiful face over 



44 MILTON 

which the grave had closed forever, led him to mus- 
ings, which, without effort, shaped themselves into 
verse. The unity of sentiment and severity of style 
which characterize these little pieces remind us of the 
Greek Anthology, ° or perhaps still more of the Collects 
of the English Liturgy. The noble poem on the Mas- 
sacres of Piedmont is strictly a Collect in verse. 

The Sonnets are more or less striking according as 
the occasions which gave birth to them are more or 

10 less interesting. But they are, almost without excep- 
tion, dignified by a sobriety and greatness of mind to 
which we know not Avhere to look for a parallel. It 
would, indeed, be scarcely safe to draw any decided 
inferences as to the character of a writer from pas- 
sages directly egotistical. But the qualities which 
we have ascribed to Milton, though perhaps most 
strongly marked in those parts of his works which 
treat of his personal feelings, are distinguishable in 
every page, and impart to all his Avritings, prose and 

20 poetry, English, Latin, and Italian, a strong family 
likeness. 

His public conduct was such as was to be expected 
from a man of a spirit so high and of an intellect so 
powerful. He lived at one of the most memorable 
eras in the history of mankind, at the very crisis of 



MILTON 45 

the great conflict between Oromasdes ° and Ari manes, ° 
liberty and despotism, reason and prejudice. That 
great battle was fought for no single generation, for 
no single land. The destinies of the human race were 
staked on the same cast with the freedom of the Eng- 
lish people. Then were first proclaimed those mighty 
principles which have since worked their way into the 
depths of the American forests, which have roused 
Greece from the slavery and degradation of two thou- 
sand years, and which, from one end of Europe to the ic 
other, have kindled an unquenchable fire in the hearts 
of the oppressed, and loosed the knees of the oppres- 
sors with an unwonted fear. 

Of those principles, then struggling for their infant 
existence, Milton was the most devoted and eloquent 
literary champion. We need not say how much we 
admire his public conduct. But we cannot disguise 
from ourselves that a large portion of his countrymen 
still think it unjustifiable. The civil war, indeed, 
has been more discussed, and is less understood, than 20 
any event in English history. The friends of liberty 
labored under the disadvantage of which the lion in 
the fable complained so bitterly. Though they were 
the conquerors, their enemies were the painters. As 
a body, the Roundheads had done their utmost to 



46 MILTON 

decry and ruin literature; and literature was even 
witli them, as, in the long run, it always is with its 
enemies. The best book on their side of the question 
is the charming narrative of Mrs. Hutchinson. ° 
May's History ° of the Parliament is good; but it 
breaks off at the most interesting crisis of the strug- 
gle. The performance of Ludlow ° is foolish and vio- 
lent; and most of the later writers who have espoused 
the same cause, 01clmixon° for instance, and Cather- 

loine Macaulay,° have, to say the least, been more dis- 
tinguished by zeal than either by candor or by skill. 
On the other side are the most authoritative and the 
most popular historical works in our language, that 
of Clarendon, ° and that of Hume.° The former is 
not only ably written and full of valuable information, 
but has also an air of dignity and sincerity which 
makes even the prejudices and errors with which it 
abounds respectable. Hume, from whose fascinating 
narrative the great mass of the reading public are still 

20 contented to take their opinions, hated religion so 
much that he hated liberty for having been allied with 
religion, and has pleaded the cause of tyranny with 
the dexterity of an advocate while affecting the im- 
partiality of a judge. 

The public conduct of Milton must be approved or 



MILTON 47 

condemned according as the resistance of the people 
to Charles the Eirst shall appear to be justifiable or 
criminal. We shall therefore make no apology for 
dedicating a few pages to the discussion of that inter- 
esting and most important question. We shall not 
argue it on general grounds. We shall not recur to 
those primary principles from which the claim of any 
government to the obedience of its subjects is to be 
deduced. We are entitled to that vantage ground; 
but we will relinquish it. We are, on this point, so lo 
confident of superiority, that we are not unwilling to 
imitate the ostentatious generosity of those ancient 
knights, who vowed to joust without helmet or shield 
against all enemies, and to give their antagonists the 
advantage of sun and wind. We will take the naked 
constitutional question. We confidently affirm, that 
every reason which can be urged in favor of the Eev- 
olution of 1688 may be urged with at least equal force 
in favor of what is called the Great Rebellion. 

In one respect, only, we think, can the warmest ad- 20 
mirers of Charles venture to say that he was a better 
sovereign than his son. He was not, in name and 
profession, a Papist; we say in name and profession, 
because both Charles himself and his creature Laud,° 
while they abjured the innocent badges of popery, 



48 MILTON 

retained all its worst vices, a complete subjection of 
reason to authority, a weak preference of form to sub- 
stance, a cliildisli passion for mummeries, an idola- 
trous veneration for the priestly character, and, above 
all, a merciless intolerance. This, however, we 
waive. We will concede that Charles was a good 
Protestant; but we say that his Protestantism does 
not make the slightest distinction between his case 
and that of James. 

The principles of the Revolution have often been 
grossly misrepresented, and never more than in the 
course of the present year. There is a certain class 
of men who, while they profess to hold in reverence 
the great names and great actions of former times, 
never look at them for any other purpose than in 
order to find in them some excuse for existing abuses. 
In every venerable precedent they pass by what is 
essential, and take only what is accidental : they keep 
out of sight what is beneficial, and hold up to public 
imitation all that is defective. If, in any part of any 
great example, there be anything unsound, these flesh- 
flies detect it with an unerring instinct, and dart upon 
it with a ravenous delight. If some good end has 
been attained in spite of them, they feel, with their 
l^rototype, that 



MILTON 49 

" Their labor must be to pervert that end, 
And out of good still to find means of evil." ° 

To the blessings wliicli England has derived from 
the devolution these people are utterly insensible. 
The expulsion of a tyrant, the solemn recognition of 
popular rights, liberty, security, toleration, all go for 
nothing with them. One sect° there was, which, 
from unfortunate temporary causes, it was thought 
necessary to keep under close restraint. One part ° 
of the empire there was so unhappily circumstanced, lo 
that at that time its misery was necessary to our hap- 
piness, and its slavery to our freedom. These are the 
parts of the Eevolution which the politicians of whom 
we speak love to contemplate, and which seem to 
them not indeed to vindicate, but in some degree to 
palliate, the good which it has produced. Talk 
to them of Naples, of Spain, or of South America. 
They stand forth zealots for the doctrine of Divine 
Eight which has now come back to us, like a thief 
from transportation, under the alias of Legitimacy. 20 
But mention the miseries of Ireland. Then William 
is a hero. Then Somers ° and Shrewsbury ° are great 
men. Then the Eevolution is a glorious era. The 
very same persons who, in this country, never omit 
an opportunity of reviving every wretched Jacobite 



50 MILTON 

slander respecting the Whigs of that period, have no 
sooner crossed St. George's Channel, than they begin 
to fill their bumpers to the glorious and immortal 
memory. They may trul}^ boast that they look not 
at men, but at measures. So that evil be done, they 
care not who does it; the arbitrary Charles, or the 
liberal William, Ferdinand the Catholic, ° or Fred- 
eric ° the Protestant. On such occasions their 
deadliest opponents may reckon upon their candid 

10 construction. The bold assertions of these people 
have of late impressed a large portion of the public 
with an opinion that James the Second was expelled 
simply because he was a Catholic, and that the Eevo- 
lution was essentially a Protestant Kevolution. 

But this certainly was not the case; nor can any 
person who has acquired more knowledge of the his- 
tory of those times than is to be found in Goldsmith's 
Abridgment ° believe that, if James had held his own 
religious opinions without wishing to make prose- 

2olytes, or if, wishing even to make proselytes, he had 
contented himself with exerting only his constitu- 
tional influence for that purpose, the Prince of Orange 
would ever have been invited over. Our ancestors, 
we suppose, knew their own meaning; and, if we may 
believe them, their hostility was primarily not to 



MILTON 51 

popery, but to tyranny. They did not drive out a 
tyrant because he was a Catholic; but they excluded 
Catholics from the crown, because they thought them 
likely to be tyrants. The ground on which they, in 
their famous resolution, declared the throne vacant, 
was this, ''that James had broken the fundamental 
laws of the kingdom." Every man, therefore, who 
approves of the Revolution of 1688 must hold that 
the breach of fundamental laws on the part of the 
sovereign justifies resistance. The question, then, is lo 
this : Had Charles the First broken the fundamental 
laws of England? 

No person can answer in the negative, unless he 
refuses credit, not merely to all the accusations 
brought against Charles b}^ his opponents, but to the 
narratives of the warmest Royalists, and to the con- 
fessions of the King himself. If there be any truth 
in any historian of any party who has related the 
events of that reign, the conduct of Charles, from his 
accession to the meeting of the Long Parliament, had 20 
been a continued course of oppression and treachery. 
Let those who applaud the Revolution, and condemn 
the Rebellion, mention one act of James the Second 
to which a parallel is not to be found in the history 
of his father. Let them lay their fingers on a single 



o2 MILTON 

article in the Declaration of Eight, ° presented by the 
two Houses to William and Mary, which Charles is 
not acknowledged to have violated. He had, accord- 
ing to the testimony of his own friends, usurped the 
functions of the legislature, raised taxes without 
the consent of parliament, and quartered troops on 
the people in the most illegal and vexatious manner. 
Not a single session of parliament had passed without 
some unconstitutional attack on the freedom of de- 

10 bate; the right of petition was grossly violated; ar- 
bitrary judgments, exorbitant fines, and unwarranted 
imprisonments were grievances of daily occurrence. 
If these things do not justify resistance, the Kevolu- 
tion was treason ; if they do, the Great Eebellion was 
laudable. 

But, it is said, why not adopt milder measures? 
Why, after the King had consented to so many re- 
forms, and renounced so many oppressive preroga- 
tives, did the parliament continue to rise in their 

20 demands at the risk of provoking a civil war? The 
ship-money ° had been given up. The Star Cham- 
ber ° had been abolished. Provision had been made 
for the frequent convocation and secure deliberation 
of parliaments. Why not pursue an end confessedly 
good by peaceable and regular means? We recur 



MILTON 53 

again to the analogy of the Ee volution. Why was 
James driven from the throne? Why was he not re- 
tained upon conditions? He too had offered to call a 
free parliament and to submit to its decision all the 
matters in dispute. Yet we are in the habit of prais- 
ing our forefathers, who preferred a revolution, a 
disputed succession, a dynasty of strangers, twenty 
years of foreign and intestine war, a standing army, 
and a national debt, to the rule, however restricted, 
of a tried and proved tyrant. The Long Parliament lo 
acted on the same principle and is entitled to the same 
praise. They could not trust the King. He had no 
doubt passed salutary laws ; but what assurance was 
there that he would not break them? He had re- 
nounced oppressive prerogatives; but where was the 
security that he would not resume them? The nation 
had to deal with a man whom no tie could bind, a 
man who made and broke promises with equal facility, 
a mxan whose honor had been a hundred times pawned, 
and never redeemed. 20 

Here, indeed, the Long Parliament stands on still 
stronger ground than the Convention of 1688. Ko 
action of James can be compared to the conduct of 
Charles with respect to the Petition of Eight. ° The 
Lords and Commons present him with a bill in which 



54 MILTON 

the constitutional limits of his power are marked out. 
He hesitates ; he evades ; at last he bargains to give 
his assent for five subsidies. The bill receives his 
solemn assent; the subsidies are voted; but no sooner 
is the tyrant relieved, than he returns at once to all 
the arbitrary measures which he had bound himself to 
abandon, and violates all the clauses of the very Act 
which he had been paid to pass. 

Por more than ten years the people had seen the 

10 rights which were theirs by a double claim, by imme- 
morial inheritance and by recent purchase, infringed 
by the perfidious king who had recognized them. At 
length circumstances compelled Charles to summon 
another Parliament: another chance was given to 
our fathers : were they to throw it away as they had 
thrown away the former? Were they again to be 
cozened by le Roi le veut?° Were they again to ad- 
vance their money on pledges which had been for- 
feited over and over again? Were they to lay a 

20 second Petition of Right at the foot of the throne, 
to grant another lavish aid in exchange for another 
unmeaning ceremony, and then to take their depart- 
ure, till, after ten years more of fraud and oppression, 
their prince should again require a supply, again 
repay it with a perjury? They were compelled to 



MILTON 55 

choose whether they would trust a tyrant or conquer 
him. We think that they chose wisely and nobly. 

The advocates of Charles, like the advocates of other 
malefactors against whom overwhelming evidence is 
produced, generally decline all controversy about the 
facts, and content themselves with calling testimony 
to character. He had so many private virtues! And 
had James the Second no private virtues? Was 
Oliver Cromwell, his bitterest enemies themselves 
being judges, destitute of private virtues? And what, lo 
after all, are the virtues ascribed to Charles? A re- 
ligious zeal, not more sincere than that of his son, and 
fully as weak and narrow-minded, and a few of the 
ordinary household decencies which half the tomb- 
stones in England claim for those who lie beneath 
them. A good father! A good husband! Ample 
apologies indeed for "fifteen years of persecution, 
tyranny, and falsehood! 

°We charge him with having broken his coronation 
oath; and we are told that he kept his marriage vow! 20 
We accuse him of having given up his people to the 
merciless inflictions of the most hot-headed and hard- 
hearted of prelates; and the defence is, that he took 
his little son on his knee and kissed him! We cen- 
sure him for having violated the articles of the Peti- 



56 MILTON 

tion of Right, after having, for good and valuable 
consideration, promised to observe them; and we are 
informed that he was accustomed to hear prayers at 
six o'clock in the morning! It is to such considera- 
tions as these, together with his Vandyke ° dress, his 
handsome face, and his peaked beard, that he owes, 
we verily believe, most of his popularity with the 
present generation. 

For ourselves, we own that we do not understand 

10 the common phrase, a good man, but a bad king. We 
can as easily conceive a good man and an unnatural 
father, or a good man and a treacherous friend. We 
cannot, in estimating the character of an individual, 
leave out of our consideration his conduct in the most 
important of all human relations ; and if in that rela- 
tion we find him to have been selfish, cruel, and deceit- 
ful, we shall take the liberty to call him a bad man, 
in spite of all his temperance at table, and all his 
regularity at chapel. 

20 W^e cannot refrain from adding a few words respect- 
ing a topic on which the defenders of Charles are fond 
of dwelling. If, they say, he governed his people ill, 
he at least governed them after the example of his 
predecessors. If he violated their privileges, it was 
because those privileges had not been accurately de- 



MILTON 57 

fined. No act of oppression has ever been imputed 
to liim which has not a parallel in the annals of the 
Tudors. This point Hume has labored, with an art 
which is as discreditable in a historical work as it 
would be admirable in a forensic address. The 
answer is short, clear, and decisive. Charles had 
assented to the Petition of Eight. He had renounced 
the oppressive powers said to have been exercised by 
his predecessors, and he had renounced them for 
money. He was not entitled to set up his antiquated lo 
claims against his own recent release. 

These arguments are so obvious, that it may seem 
superfluous to dwell upon them. But those who have 
observed how much the events of that time are mis- 
represented and misunderstood will not blame us for 
stating the case simply. It is a case of which the 
simplest statement is the strongest. 

The enemies of the Parliament, indeed, rarely 
choose to take issue on the great points of the ques- 
tion. They content themselves with exposing some 20 
of the crimes and follies to which public commotions 
necessarily give birth. They bewail the unmerited 
fate of Strafford. ° They execrate the lawless violence 
of the army. They laugh at the Scriptural names of 
the preachers. Major-generals fleecing their dis- 



58 MILTON 

tricts; soldiers revelling on the spoils of a ruined 
peasantry; upstarts, enriched by the public plunder, 
taking possession of the hospitable firesides and 
hereditary trees of the old gentry; boys smashing 
the beautiful windows of cathedrals; Quakers ° riding 
naked through the market-place; Fifth-monarchy ° 
men shouting for King Jesus; agitators lecturing 
from the tops of tubs on the fate of Agag,° — all these, 
they tell us, were the offspring of the Great Eebellion. 

10 Be it so. We are not careful to answer in this 
matter. These charges, were they infinitely more 
important, would not alter our opinion of an event 
which alone has made us to differ from the slaves who 
crouch beneath despotic sceptres. Many evils, no 
doubt, were produced by the civil war. They were 
the price of our liberty. Has the acquisition been 
worth the sacrifice? It is the nature of the Devil of 
tyranny to tear and rend the body which he leaves. 
Are the miseries of continued possession less horrible 

20 than the struggles of the tremendous exorcism? 

If it were possible that a people brought up under 
an intolerant and arbitrary system could subvert that 
system without acts of cruelty and folly, half the ob- 
jections to despotic power would be removed. We 
should, in that case, be compelled to acknowledge 



MILTON 59 

that it at least produces no pernicious effects on the 
intellectual and moral character of a nation. We 
deplore the outrages which accompany revolutions. 
But the more violent the outrages, the more assured 
we feel that a revolution was necessary. The violence 
of those outrages will always be proportioned to the 
ferocity and ignorance of the people ; and the ferocity 
and ignorance of the people will be proportioned to 
the oppression and degradation under which they 
have been accustomed to live. Thus it was in our lo 
civil war. The heads of the church and state reaped 
only that which they had sown. The government 
had prohibited free discussion : it had done its best 
to keep the people unacquainted with their duties 
and their rights. The retribution was just and natu- 
ral. If our rulers suffered from popular ignorance, 
it was because they had themselves taken away the 
key of knowledge. If they were assailed with blind 
fury, it was because they had exacted an equally blind 
submission. 20 

It is the character of such revolutions that we 
always see the worst of them at first. Till men have 
been some time free, they know not how to use their 
freedom. The natives of wine countries are generally 
sober. In climates where wine is a rarity intemper- 



60 MILTON 

ance abounds. A newly liberated people may be 
compared to a northern army encamped on the Rhine 
or the Xeres.° It is said that, when soldiers in such a 
situation first find themselves able to indulge without 
restraint in such a rare and expensive luxury, nothing 
is to be seen but intoxication. Soon, however, plenty 
teaches discretion; and, after wine has been for a few 
months their daily fare, they become more temperate 
than they had ever been in their own country. In 

lothe same manner, the final and permanent fruits of 
liberty are wisdom, moderation, and mercy. Its im- 
mediate effects are often atrocious crimes, conflicting 
errors, scepticism on points the most clear, dogma- 
tism on points the most mysterious. It is just at this 
crisis that its enemies love to exhibit it. They pull 
down the scaffolding from the half-finished edifice: 
they point to the flying dust, the falling bricks, the 
comfortless rooms, the frightful irregularity of the 
whole appearance; and then ask in scorn where 

20 the promised splendor and comfort is to be found. 
If such miserable sophisms were to prevail, there 
would never be a good house or a good government in 
the world. 

Ariosto tells a pretty story of a fairy, ° who, by 
some mysterious law of her nature, was condemned to 



MILTOJS 61 

appear at certain seasons in the form of a foul and 
poisonous snake. Those who injured her during the 
period of her disguise were forever excluded from 
participation in the blessings which she bestowed. 
But to those who, in spite of her loathsome aspect, 
pitied and protected her, she afterwards revealed her- 
self in the beautiful and celestial form which was 
natural to her, accompanied their steps, granted all 
their wishes, filled their houses with wealth, made 
them happy in love and victorious in war. Such a lo 
spirit is Liberty. At times she takes the form of a 
hateful reptile. She grovels, she hisses, she stings. 
But woe to those who in disgust shall venture to crush 
her ! And happy are those who, having dared to re- 
ceive her in her degraded and frightful shape, shall at 
length be rewarded by her in the time of her beauty 
and her glory ! 

There is only one cure for the evils which newly 
acquired freedom produces; and that cure is freedom. 
When a prisoner first leaves his cell he cannot bear 20 
the light of day : he is unable to discriminate colors, 
or recognize faces. But the remedy is not to remand 
him into his dungeon, but to accustom him to the rays 
of the sun. The blaze of truth and liberty may at 
first dazzle and bewilder nations which have become 



62 MILTON 

half blind in the house of bondage. But let them 
gaze on, and they will soon be able to bear it. In a 
few years men learn to reason. The extreme vio- 
lence of opinions subsides. Hostile theories correct 
each other. The scattered elements of truth cease to 
contend, and begin to coalesce. And at length a 
system of justice and order is educed out of the chaos. 
Many politicians of our time are in the habit of 
laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no 

10 people ought to be free till they are fit to use their 
freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old 
story who resolved not to go into the water till he 
had learnt to swim. If men are to wait for liberty 
till they become wise and good in slavery, they may 
indeed wait forever. 

Therefore it is that Ave decidedly approve of the 
conduct of Milton and the other wise and good men 
who, in spite of much that was ridiculous and hateful 
in the conduct of their associates, stood firmly by the 

20 cause of Public Liberty. "We are not aware that the 
poet has been charged with personal participation in 
any of the blameable excesses of that time. The 
favorite topic of his enemies is the line of conduct 
which he pursued with regard to the execution of the 
King. Of that celebrated proceeding we by no means 



MILTON 63 

approve. Still we must say, in justice to the many 
eminent persons who concurred in it, and in justice 
more particularly to the eminent person who defended 
it, that nothing can be more absurd than the imputa- 
tions which, for the last hundred and sixty years, it 
has been the fashion to cast upon the Eegicides.° We 
have, throughout, abstained from appealing to first 
principles. We will not appeal to them now. AVe 
recur again to the parallel case of the Eevolution. 
What essential distinction can be drawn between lo 
the execution of the father and the deposition of the 
son? What constitutional maxim is there which ap- 
plies to the former and not to the latter? The King 
can do no wrong. If so, James was as innocent as 
Charles could have been. The minister only ought 
to be responsible for the acts of the Sovereign. If 
so, why not impeach Jeffreys ° and retain James? 
The person of a King is sacred. Was the person 
of James considered sacred at the Boyne?° To dis- 
charge cannon against an army in which a King is 20 
known to be posted is to approach pretty near to regi- 
cide. Charles, too, it should always be remembered, 
was put to death by men who had been exasperated by 
the hostilities of several years, and who had never 
been bound to him by any other tie than that which 



64 MILTON 

was common to them with all their fellow-citizens. 
Those who drove James from his throne, who seduced 
his army, who alienated his friends, who first impris- 
oned him in his palace, and then turned him out of it, 
who broke in upon his very slumbers by imperious 
messages, who pursued him with fire and sword from 
one part of the empire to another, who hanged, drew, 
and quartered his adherents, and attainted his inno- 
cent heir, were his nephew and his two daughters. 

lo When we reflect on all these things, we are at a loss 
to conceive how the same persons who, on the fifth of 
November, thank God for wonderfully conducting his 
servant William, and for making all opposition fall 
before him until he became our King and Governor, 
can, on the thirtieth of January, contrive to be afraid 
that the blood of the Koyal Martyr may be visited on 
themselves and their children. 

We disapprove, we repeat, of the execution of 
Charles; not because the constitution exempts the 

20 King from responsibility, for we know that all such 
maxims, however excellent, have their exceptions; 
nor because we feel any peculiar interest in his char- 
acter, for we think that his sentence describes him 
with perfect justice as "a tyrant, a traitor, a mur- 
derer, and a public enemy " ; but because we are con- 



MILTON 65 

vinced that the measure was most injurious to the 
cause of freedom. He whom it removed was a cap- 
tive and a hostage : his heir, to whom the allegiance 
of every Eoyalist was instantly transferred, was at 
large. The Presbyterians could never have been per- 
fectly reconciled to the father: they had no such 
rooted enmity to the son. The great body of the 
people, also, contemplated that proceeding with feel- 
ings which, however unreasonable, no government 
could safely venture to outrage. lo 

But though we think the conduct of the Regicides 
blameable, that of Milton appears to us in a very dif- 
ferent light. The deed was done. It could not be 
undone. The evil was incurred, and the object was 
to render it as small as possible. We censure the 
cliiefs of the army for not yielding to the popular 
opinion ; but we cannot censure Milton for wishing to 
change that opinion. The very feeling which would 
have restrained us from committing the act Avould 
have led us, after it had been committed, to defend it 20 
against the ravings of servility and superstition. 
For the sake of public liberty, we wish that the thing 
had not been done, while the people disapproved of 
it. But, for the sake of public liberty, we should also 
have wished the people to approve of it when it was 



66 MILTON- 

done. If anything more were wanting to the justifica- 
tion of Milton, the book of Salmasius ° would furnish 
it. That miserable performance is now Avith justice 
considered only as a beacon to word-catchers, who 
wish to become statesmen. The celebrity of the man 
who refuted it, the "^Enese magni dextra," gives it 
all its fame with the present generation. In that age 
the state of things was different. It was not - then 
fully understood how vast an interval separates the 

10 mere classical scholar from the political philosopher. 
Nor can it be doubted that a treatise which, bearing 
the name of so eminent a critic, attacked the funda- 
mental principles of all free governments, must, if 
suffered to remain unanswered, have produced a most 
pernicious effect on the public mind. 

We wish to add a few words relative to another 
subject, on which the enemies of Milton delight to 
dwell, his conduct during the administration of the 
Protector. That an enthusiastic votary of liberty 

20 should accept office under a military usurper seems, 
no doubt, at first sight, extraordinary. But all the 
circumstances in which the country was then placed 
were extraordinary. The ambition of Oliver was of 
no vulgar kind. . He never seems to have coveted 
despotic power. He at first fought sincerely and 



MILTON 67 

manfully for the Parliament, and never deserted it, 
till it had deserted its duty. If he dissolved it by 
force, it was not till he found that the few members 
who remained after so many deaths, secessions, and 
expulsions, were desirous to appropriate to themselves 
a power which they held only in trust, and to inflict 
upon England the curse of a Venetian oligarchy. ° But 
even when thus placed by violence at the head of 
affairs, he did not assume unlimited power. He 
gave the country a constitution far more perfect than lo 
any which had at that time been known in the world. 
He reformed the representative system in a manner 
which has extorted praise even from Lord Clarendon. 
For himself he demanded indeed the first place in the 
commonwealth; but with powers scarcely so great as 
those of a Dutch stadtholder,° or an American presi- 
dent. He gave the Parliament a voice in the appoint- 
ment of ministers, and left to it the whole legislative 
authority, not even reserving to himself a veto on its 
enactments; and he did not require that the chief 20 
magistracy should be hereditary in his family. Thus 
far, we think, if the circumstances of the time and 
the opportunities which he had of aggrandizing him- 
self be fairly considered, he will not lose by compari- 
son with Washington or Bolivar. ° Had his moderation 



6S MILTON 

been met with corresponding- moderation, there is no 
reason to think that he woukl have overstepped the 
line which he had traced for himself. But when he 
found that his Parliaments questioned the authority 
under which they met, and that he was in danger of 
being deprived of the restricted power which was 
absolutely necessary to his personal safety, then, it 
must be acknowledged, he adopted a more arbitrary 
policy. 

• Yet, though we believe that the intentions of Crom- 
well were at first honest, though we believe that he 
was driven from the noble course which he had marked 
out for himself by the almost irresistible force of cir- 
cumstances, though we admire, in common with all 
men of all parties, the ability and energy of his splen- 
did administration, we are not pleading for arbitrary 
and lawless power, even in his hands. We know that 
a good constitution is infinitely better than the best 
despot. But we suspect, that at the time of which 
< we speak the violence of religious and political enmi- 
ties rendered a stable and happy settlement next to 
impossible. The choice lay, not between Cromwell 
and liberty, but between Cromwell and the Stuarts. 
That Milton chose well, no man can doubt who fairly 
compares the events of the protectorate with those of 



MILTON 69 

the thirty years which succeeded it, the darkest and 
most disgraceful in the English annals. Cromwell 
was evidently laying, though in an irregular manner, 
the foundations of an admirable system. Never 
before had religious liberty and the freedom of discus- 
sion been enjoyed in a greater degree. Never had the 
national honor been better upheld abroad, or the seat 
of justice better filled at home. And it was rarely 
that any opposition which stopped short of open re- 
bellion provoked the resentment of the liberal and lo 
magnanimous usurper. The institutions which he 
had established, as set down in the Instrument of Gov- 
ernment, ° and the Humble Petition ° and Advice, ° 
were excellent. His practice, it is true, too often 
departed from the theory of these institutions. But, 
had he lived a few years longer, it is probable that 
his institutions would have survived him, and that his 
arbitrary practice would have died with him. His 
power had not been consecrated by ancient prejudices. 
It was upheld only by his great personal qualities. 20 
Little, therefore, was to be dreaded from a second pro- 
tector, unless he was also a second Oliver Cromwell. 
The events which followed his decease are the most 
complete vindication of those who exerted themselves 
to uphold his authority. His death dissolved the 



70 MILTON 

whole frame of society. The army rose against the 
Parliament, the different corps of the army against 
each other. Sect raved against sect. Party plotted 
against party. The Presbyterians, in their eagerness 
to be revenged on the Independents, ° sacrificed their 
own liberty, and deserted all their old principles. 
Without casting one glance on the past, or requiring 
one stipulation for the future, they threw down their 
freedom at the feet of the most frivolous and heart- 

10 less of tyrants. 

° Then came those days, never to be recalled without 
a blush, the days of servitude without loyalty and sen- 
suality without love, of dwarfish talents and gigantic 
vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow minds, 
the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave. 
The King cringed to his rival that he might trample 
on his people, sank into a viceroy of rrance,° and 
pocketed, with complacent infamy, her degrading in- 
sults and her more degrading gold. The caresses of 

20 harlots and the jests of buffoons regulated the policy 
of the state. The government had just ability enough 
to deceive, and just religion enough to persecute. 
The principles of liberty were the scoff of every grin- 
ning courtier, and the anathema maranatha of every 
fawning dean. In every high place, worship was paid 



MILTON, 71 

to Charles and James, Belial and Moloch ; and Eng- 
land propitiated those obscene and cruel idols with 
the blood of her best and bravest children. Crime 
succeeded to crime, and disgrace to disgrace, till the 
race accursed of God and man was a second time 
driven forth, to wander on the face of the earth, and 
to be a by-word and a shaking of the head to the 
nations. 

]\Iost of the remarks which we have hitherto made 
on the public character of Milton, apply to him onl}- lo 
as one of a large body. We shall proceed to notice 
some of the peculiarities which distinguished him 
from his contemporaries. And, for that purpose, it 
is necessary to take a short survey of the parties into 
which the political world was at that time divided. 
We must premise, that our observations are intended 
to apply only to those who adhered, from a sincere 
preference, to one or to the other side. In days of 
public commotion, every faction, like an Oriental 
army, is attended by a crowd of camp-followers, an 20 
useless and heartless rabble, who prowl round its line 
of march in the hope of picking up somethiug under 
its protection, but desert it in the day of battle, and 
often join to exterminate it after a defeat. England, 
at the time of which we are treating, abounded with 



72 MILTON 

fickle and selfish politicians, who transferred their 
support to every government as it rose, who kissed 
the hand of the King in 1640, and spat in his face in 
1649, who shouted with equal glee when Cromwell 
was inaugurated in Westminster Hall, and when he 
was dug up to be hanged at Tyburn, who dined on 
calves' head, or stuck up oak-branches, as circum- 
stances altered, without the slightest shame or repug- 
nance. These we leave out of the account. We take 

10 our estimate of parties from those who really deserved 
to be called partisans. 

We would speak first of the Puritans, the most re- 
markable body of men, perhaps, which the world has 
ever produced. The odious and ridiculous parts of 
their character lie on the surface. He that runs may 
read them; nor have there been wanting attentive and 
malicious observers to point them out. Por many 
years after the Eestoration, they were the theme of 
unmeasured invective and derision. They were ex- 

20 posed to the utmost licentiousness of the press and of 
the stage, at the time when the press and the stage 
were most licentious. They were not men of letters ; 
they were as a body unpopular; they could not de- 
fend themselves; and the public would not take them 
under its protection. They were therefore aban- 



MILTON 73 

doned, without reserve, to the tender mercies of the 
satirists and dramatists. The ostentatious simplicity 
of theii; dress, their sour aspect, their nasal twang, 
their stiff posture, their long graces, their Hebrew 
names, the Scriptural phrases which they introduced 
on every occasion, their contempt of human Icttrning, 
their detestation of polite amusements, were indeed 
fair game for the laughers. But it is not from the 
laughers alone that the philosophy of history is to be 
learnt. And he who approaches this subject should lo 
carefully guard against the influence of that potent 
ridicule which has already misled so inany excellent 
writers. 

*' Ecco il fonte del riso, ed ecco il rio 
Che mortali perigli in se contiene : 
Hor qui tener a fren nostro desio, 
Ed esser cauti molto a noi conviene." ° 

Those who roused the people to resistance, who 
directed their measures through a long series of event- 
ful years, who formed, out of the most unpromising 20 
materials, the finest army that Europe had ever seen, 
who trampled down King, Church, and Aristocracy, 
who, in the short intervals of domestic sedition and 
rebellion, made the name of England terrible to every 
nation on the face of the earth, were no vulgar fa- 



74 MILTON 

natics. Most of tlieir absurdities Avere mere external 
badges, like the signs of freemasonry, or the dresses 
of friars. ° We regret that these badges \vere not 
more attractive. We regret that a body to whose 
courage and talents mankind has owed inestimable 
obligations had not the lofty elegance which distin- 
guished some of the adherents of Charles the First, 
or the easy good breeding for which the court of 
Charles the Second was celebrated. But, if we must 

lo make our choice, we shall, like Bassanio ° in the play, 
turn from the specious caskets which contain only the 
Death^s head and the Fool's head, and fix on the plain 
leaden chest which conceals the treasure. 

° The Puritans were men Avhose minds had derived a 
peculiar character from the daily contemplation of 
superior beings and eternal interests. Not content 
with acknowledging, in general terms, an overruling 
Providence, they habitually ascribed every event to 
the will of the Great Being, for whose power nothing 

20 was too vast, for whose inspection nothing was too 
minute. To know him, to serve him, to enjoy him, 
was witli them the great end of existence. They re- 
jected with contempt the ceremonious homage which 
other sects substituted for the pure worship of the 
soul. Instead of catching occasional glimpses of tlip 



MILTON 75 

Deity through an obscuring veil, they aspired to gaze 
full on his intolerable brightness, and to commune 
with him face to face. Hence originated their con- 
tempt for terrestrial distinctions. The difference 
between the greatest and the meanest of mankind 
seemed to vanish, when compared with the boundless 
interval which separated the whole race from him on 
whom their own eyes were constantly fixed. They 
recognized no title to superiority but his favor; and, 
confident of that favor, they despised all the accom- lo 
plishments and all the dignities of the world. If 
they were unacquainted with the works of philosophers 
and poets, they Avere deeply read in the oracles of 
God. If their names were not, found in the registers 
of heralds, they were recorded in the Book of Life. 
If their steps were not accompanied by a splendid 
train of menials, legions of ministering angels had 
charge over them. Their palaces were houses not 
made with hands; their diadems crowns of glory 
which should never fade away. On the rich and the 20 
eloquent, on nobles and priests, they looked doAvn with 
contempt: for they esteemed themselves rich in a 
more precious treasure, and eloquent in a more sub- 
lime language, nobles by the right of an earlier crea- 
tion, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand. 



76 MILTON 

The very meanest of tliem was a being to whose fate 
a mysterious and terrible importance belonged, on 
whose slightest action the spirits of light and dark- 
ness looked with anxious interest, who had been des- 
tined, before heaven and earth were created, to enjoy 
a felicity which should continue when heaven and 
earth should have passed away. Events which short- 
sighted politicians ascribed to earthly causes had been 
ordained on his account. For his sake empires had 

10 risen, and flourished, and decayed. For his sake the 
Almighty had proclaimed his will by the pen of the 
evangelist and the harp of the prophet. He had 
been wrested by no common deliverer from the grasp 
of no common foe. He had been ransomed by the 
sweat of no vulgar agony, by the blood of no earthly 
sacrifice. It was for him that the sun had been dark- 
ened, that the rocks had been rent, that the dead had 
risen, that all nature had shuddered at the sufferings 
of her expiring God. 

20 Thus the Puritan was made up of two different 
men, the one all self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, 
passion, the other proud, calm, inflexible, sagacious. 
He prostrated himself in the dust before his Maker : 
but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his 
devotional retirement, he prayed with convulsions, 



MILTON 77 

and groans, and tears. He was half-maddened by 
glorious or terrible illusions. He heard the lyres of 
angels or the tempting whispers of fiends. He caught 
a gleam of the Beatific Vision, ° or woke screaming 
from dreams of everlasting fire. Like Vane,° he 
thought himself intrusted with the sceptre of the 
millennial year. Like Fleetwood, ° he cried in the 
bitterness of his soul that God had hid his face from 
him. But when he took his seat in the council, or 
girt on his sword for war, these tempestuous work- lo 
ings of the soul had left no perceptible trace behind 
thein. People who saw nothing of the godly but their 
uncouth visages, and heard nothing from them but 
their groans and their whining hymns, might laugh 
at them. But those had little reason to laugh who 
encountered them in the hall of debate or in the field 
of battle. These fanatics brought to civil and mili- 
tary affairs a coolness of judgment and an immuta- 
bility of purpose which some writers have thought 
inconsistent with their religious zeal, but which were 20 
in fact the necessary effects of it. The intensity of 
their feelings on one subject made them tranquil on 
every other. One overpowering sentiment had sub- 
jected to itself pity and hatred, ambition and fear. 
Death had lost its terrors and pleasure its charms. 



78 MILTON 

They had their smiles and their tears, their raptures 
and their sorrows, but not for the things of this 
workl. Enthusiasm had made them Stoics, had 
cleared tlieir minds from every vulgar passion and 
prejudice, and raised them above the influence of 
danger and of corruption. It sometimes might lead 
them to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose un- 
wise means. They went through the world, like Sir 
Artegal's iron man Talus ° with his flail, crushing and 

10 trampling down oppressors, mingling with human 
beings, but having neither part or lot in human infir-. 
mities, insensible to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain, 
not to be pierced by any weapon, not to be withstood 
by any barrier. 

Such we believe to have been the character of the 
Puritans. We perceive the absurdity of their man- 
ners. We dislike the sullen gloom of their domestic 
habits. We acknowledge that the tone of their mind 
was often injured by straining after things too high 

20 for mortal reach : and we know that, in spite of their 
hatred of poper}^, they too often fell into the worst 
vices of that bad system, intolerance and extravagant 
austerity, that they had their anchorites and their 
crusades, their Dunstans° and their De Montforts,° 
their Dominies ° and their Escobars. ° Yet, when all 



MILTON' 79 

circumstances are taken into consideration, we do not 
hesitate to pronounce them a brave, a wise, an honest, 
and an useful body. 

The Puritans espoused the cause of civil liberty 
mainly because it was the cause of religion. There 
was another party, by no means numerous, but dis- 
tinguished by learning and ability, which acted with 
them on very different principles. We speak of those 
whom Cromwell was accustomed to call the Heathens, 
men who were, in the phraseology of that time, lo 
doubting Thomases or careless Gallios ° with regard to 
religious subjects, but passionate Avorshippers of free- 
dom. Heated by the study of ancient literature, they 
set up their country as their idol, and proposed to 
themselves the heroes of Plutarch as their examples. 
They seem to have borne some resemblance to the Bris- 
sotines ° of the Prench Ke volution. But it is not very 
easy to draw the line of distinction between them and 
their devout associates, whose tone and manner they 
sometimes found it convenient to affect, and some- 20 
times, it is probable, imperceptibly adopted. 

We now come to the Royalists. We shall attempt 
to speak of them, as we have spoken of their antago- 
nists, with perfect candor. We shall not charge upon 
a whole party the profligacy and baseness of the horse- 



80 MILTON 

boys, gamblers, and bravoes, whom the hope of license 
and plunder attracted from all the dens of White- 
friars ° to the standard of Charles, and who disgraced 
their associates by excesses which, under the stricter 
discipline of the Parliamentary armies, were never 
tolerated. We will select a more favorable specimen. 
Thinking as we do that the cause of the King was the 
cause of bigotry and tyranny, we yet cannot refrain 
from looking with complacency on the character of 

10 the honest old Cavaliers. We feel a national pride in 
comparing them with the instruments which the des- 
pots of other countries are compelled to employ, with 
the mutes who throng their antechambers, and the 
Janissaries ° who mount guard at their gates. Our 
Koyalist countrymen were not heartless, dangling 
courtiers, bowing at every step, and simpering at 
every word. They were not mere machines for 
destruction, dressed up in uniforms, caned into skill, 
intoxicated into valor, defending without love, de- 

2ostroying without hatred. There was a freedom in 
their subserviency, a nobleness in their very degra- 
dation. The sentiment of individual independence 
was strong within them. They were indeed misled, 
but by no base or selfish motive. Compassion and 
romantic honor, the prejudices of childhood, and the 



MILTON 81 

venerable names of history threw over them a spell 
potent as that of Duessa;° and, like the Eed-Cross 
Knight, ° they thought that they were doing battle for 
an injured beauty, while they defended a false and 
loathsome sorceress. In truth they scarcely entered 
at all into the merits of the political question. It 
was not for a treacherous king or an intolerant church 
that they fought, but for the old banner which had 
waved in so many battles over the heads of their fa- 
thers, and for the altars at which they had received the lo 
hands of their brides. Though nothing could be more 
erroneous than their political opinions, they possessed, 
in a far greater degree than their adversaries, those 
qualities w^hich are the grace of private life. With 
many of the vices of the Eound Table, they had also 
many of its virtues, courtesy, generosity, veracity, 
tenderness, and respect for women. They had far 
more both of profound and of polite learning than the 
Puritans. Their manners were more engaging, their 
tempers more amiable, their tastes more elegant, and 20 
their households more cheerful. 

Milton did not strictly belong to any of the classes 
which we have described. He was not a Puritan. 
He was not a freethinker. He was not a Eoyalist. 
In his character the noblest qualities of every party 



82 MILTON 

were combined in harmonious union. From the Par- 
liament and from the Court, from the conventicle and 
from the Gothic cloister, from the gloomy and sepul- 
chral circles of the Soundheads, and from the Christ- 
mas revel of the hospitable Cavalier, his nature 
selected and drew to itself whatever was great and 
good, while it rejected all the base and pernicious in- 
gredients by which those finer elements were defiled. 
Like the Puritans, he lived 

10 " As ever in his great task-master's ej'e." ° 

Like them, he kept his mind continually fixed on an 
Almighty Judge and an eternal reward. And hence 
he acquired their contempt of external circumstances, 
their fortitude, their tranquillity, their inflexible 
resolution. But not the coolest sceptic or the most 
profane scoffer was more perfectly free from the con- 
tagion of their frantic delusions, their savage manners, 
their ludicrous jargon, their scorn of science, and 
their aversion to pleasure. Hating tyranny with a 
20 perfect hatred, he had nevertheless all the estimable 
and ornamental qualities which were almost entirely 
monopolized by the party of the tyrant. There was 
none who had a stronger sense of the value of litera- 
ture, a finer relish for every elegant amusement, or a 



MILTOy 83 

more chivalrous delicacy of honor and love. Though 
his opinions were democratic, his tastes and his asso- 
ciates were such as harmonize best with monarchy and 
aristocracy. He was under the influence of all the 
feelings by which the gallant Cavaliers were misled. 
But of those feelings he was the master and not the 
slave. Like the hero of Homer, he enjoyed all the 
pleasures of fascination; but he was not fascinated. 
He listened to the song of the Sirens; ° yet he glided 
by without being seduced to their fatal shore. He lo 
tasted the cup of Circe; ° but he bore about him a sure 
antidote against the effects of its bewitching sweet- 
ness. The allusions which captivated his imagination 
never impaired his reasoning powers. The statesman 
Avas proof against the splendor, the solemnity, and 
the romance which enchanted the poet. Any person 
who will contrast the sentiments expressed in his 
treatises on Prelacy with the exquisite lines ° on eccle- 
siastical architecture and music in the Penseroso, 
which was published about the same time, will under- 20 
stand our meaning. This is an inconsistency which, 
more than anything else, raises his character in our 
estimation, because it shows how many private tastes 
and feelings he sacrificed, in order to do what he con- 
sidered his duty to mankind. It is the very struggle 



84 MILTON 

of the noble Otliello. His heart relents : but his hand 
is firm. He does nought in hate, but all in honor. 
He kisses the beautiful deceiver before he destroys her. 
That from which the public character of Milton de- 
rives its great and peculiar splendor, still remains to 
be mentioned. If he exerted himself to overthrow a 
forsworn king and a persecuting hierarchy, he exerted 
himself in conjunction with others. But the glory 
of the battle which he fought for the species of free- 

10 dom which is the most valuable, and which was then 
the least understood, the freedom of the human mind, 
is all his own. Thousands and tens of thousands 
among his contemporaries raised their voices against 
ship-money and the Star Chamber. But there were 
few indeed who discerned the more fearful evils of 
moral and intellectual slavery, and the benefits which 
would result from the liberty of the press and the 
unfettered exercise of private judgment. These were 
the objects which Milton justly conceived to be the 

20 most important. He was desirous that the people 
should think for themselves as well as tax them- 
selves, and should be emanicipated from the dominion 
of prejudice as well as from that of Charles. He knew 
that those who, with the best intentions, overlooked 
these schemes of reform, and contented themselves 



MILTON ^5 

with pulling down the King and imprisoning the 
malignants, acted like the heedless brothers in his 
own poem, who, in their eagerness to disperse the 
train of the sorcerer, neglected the means of liberat- 
ing the captive. They thought only of conquering 
when they should have thought of disenchanting. 

" Oh, ye mistook! Ye should have snatched his wand 
And bound him fast. Without the rod reversed, 
And backward mutters of dissevering power, 
We cannot free the lady that sits here lo 

Bound in strong fetters fixed and motionless." ° 

To reverse the rod, to spell the charm backward, 
to break the ties which bound a stupefied peoj)le to 
the seat of enchantment, was the noble aim of Milton. 
To this all his public conduct was directed. For this 
he joined the Presbyterians; for this he forsook them. 
He fought their perilous battle; but he turned away 
with disdain from their insolent triumph. He saw 
that they, like those whom they had vanquished, 
were hostile to the liberty of thought. He therefore 20 
joined the Independents, and called upon Cromwell to 
break the secular chain, ° and to save free conscience 
from the paw of the Presbyterian wolf.° With a view 
to the same great object, he attacked the licensing 
system/ in that sublime treatise which every states- 



S6 MILTON 

man should wear as a sign upon liis hand and as front- 
lets ° between his eyes. His attacks were, in general, 
directed less against particular abuses than against 
those deeply seated errors on which almost all abuses 
are founded, the servile worship of eminent men ana 
the irrational dread of innovation. 

That he might shake the foundations of these debas- 
ing sentiments more effectually, he always selected 
for himself the boldest literary services. He never 

10 came up in the rear when the outworks had been 
carried and the breach entered. He pressed into the 
forlorn hope. At the beginning of the changes, he 
wrote with incomparable energy and eloquence against 
the bishops. But, when his opinion seemed likely to 
prevail, he passed on to other subjects, and abandoned 
prelacy to the crowd of writers who now hastened to 
insult a falling x^^^i'ty. There is no more hazardous 
enterprise than that of bearing the torch of truth into 
those dark and infected recesses in which no light 

20 has ever shone. But it was the choice and the pleas- 
ure of Milton to penetrate the noisome vapors, and to 
brave the terrible explosion. Those who most dis- 
approve of his opinions must respect the hardihood 
with which he maintained them. He, in general, left 
to others the credit of expounding and defending the 



MILTOX 87 

popular parts of his religious and political creed. He 
took his own stand upon those which the great body 
of his countrymen reprobated as criminal, or derided 
as paradoxical. He stood up for divorce ° and regicide. 
He attacked the prevailing systems of education. His 
radiant and beneficent career resembled that of the 
god of light and fertility. 

" Nitor in adversum; nee me, qui cfetera, vincit 
Impetus, et rapido coutrarius evehor orbi." ° 

It is to be regretted that the prose writings of Mil- lo 
ton should, in our time, be so little read. As com- 
positions, they deserve the attention of every man 
wlio wishes to become acquainted with the full power 
of the English language. They abound with passages 
compared with which the finest declamations of Burke ° 
sink into insignificance. They are a perfect field of 
cloth of gold. The style is stiff with gorgeous em- 
broidery. Not even in the earlier books of the Para- 
dise Lost has the great poet ever risen higher than in 
those parts of his controversial works in which his 20 
feelings, excited by conflict, find a vent in bursts of 
devotional and lyric rapture. It is, to borrow his 
own majestic language, "a seven-fold chorus of 
hallelujahs and harping symphonies." 



88 MILTON 

We had intended to look more closely at these per- 
formances, to analyze the peculiarities of the diction, 
to dwell at some length on the sublime wisdom of the 
Areopagitica° and the nervous rhetoric of the Icono- 
clast, ° and to point out some of those magnificent pas- 
sages which occur in the Treatise of Eeformation,° 
and the Animadversions on the Eemonstrant.° But 
the length to which our remarks have already ex- 
tended renders this impossible. 

lo We must conclude. And yet we can scarcely tear 
ourselves away from the subject. The days immedi- 
ately following the publication of this relic of Milton 
appear to be peculiarly set apart, and consecrated to 
his memory. And we shall scarcely be censured if, 
on this his festival, we be found lingering near his 
shrine, how worthless soever may be the offering 
which we bring to it. While this book lies on our 
table, we seem to be contemporaries of the writer. 
We are transported a hundred and fifty years back. 

20 We can almost fancy that w^e are visiting him in his 
small lodging; that we see him sitting at the old 
organ beneatli the faded green hangings ; that we can 
catch the quick twinkle of his eyes, rolling in vain to 
find the day; that we are reading in the lines of his 
noble countenance the proud and mournful history of 



MILTON 89 

his glory and his affliction. We image to ourselves 
the breathless silence in which we should listen to his 
slightest word, the passionate veneration with which 
we should kneel to kiss his hand and weep upon it, 
the earnestness with which we should endeavor to 
console him, if indeed such a spirit could need con- 
solation, for the neglect of an age unworthy of his 
talents and his virtues, the eagerness with which we 
should contest with his daughters, or with his Quaker 
friend Elwood,° the privilege of reading Homer to lo 
him, or of taking down the immortal accents which 
flowed from his lips. 

These are perhaps foolish feelings. Yet Ave cannot 
be ashamed of them; nor shall we be sorry if what we 
have written shall in any degree excite them in other 
minds. We are not much in the habit of idolizing 
either the living or the dead. And we think that 
there is no more certain indication of a weak and ill- 
regulated intellect than that propensity which, for 
want of a better name, we will venture to christen 2c 
Boswellism. But there are a few characters which 
have stood the closest scrutiny and the severest tests, 
which have been tried in the furnace and have proved 
pure, which have been weighed in the balance and 
have not been found wanting, which have been de- 



90 MILTON 

clared sterling by the general consent of mankind, and 
which are visibly stamped with the image and super- 
scription of the Most High. These great men we 
trust that we know how to prize ; and of these was 
Milton. The sight of his books, the sound of his 
name, are pleasant to us. His thoughts resemble 
those celestial fruits and flowers which the Virgin 
Martyr of Massinger sent down from the gardens of 
Paradise to the earth, and which were distinguished 

10 from the productions of other soils, not only by su- 
perior bloom and sweetness, but by miraculous efficacy 
to invigorate and to heal. They are powerful, not 
only to delight, but to elevate and purify. Nor do 
we envy the man who can study either the life or the 
writings of the great poet and patriot, without aspir- 
ing to emulate, not indeed the sublime works with 
which his genius has enriched our literature, but the 
zeal with which he labored for the public good, the 
fortitude with which he endured every private ca- 

2olamity, the lofty disdain with which he looked down 
on temptations and dangers, the deadly hatred which 
he bore to bigots and tyrants, and the faith which he 
so sternly kept with his country and with his fame. 



NOTES 



This essay was published in tlie Edinburgh Beview, in 
August, 1825, and was the first of the brilliant series of essays 
and reviews which Macaulay contributed to that magazine. It 
contains much to which modern criticism objects. Indeed, 
Macaulay himself says of it in the preface to the first authorized 
edition of his essays: "No attempt has been made to remodel 
any of the pieces which are contained in these volumes. Even 
the criticism on Milton, which was written when the author was 
fresh from college, and which contains scarcely a paragraph 
such as his matured judgment approves, still remains overloaded 
with gaudy and ungraceful ornament.'" Yet notwithstanding 
this the essay will abundantly repay the most careful study. It 
treats of one of the most interesting periods of English litera- 
ture ; and it is written v/ith an earnestness and fresh enthusiasm 
which must both invigorate the student and inspire him to a 
closer study and a more judicious criticism of the works of the 
world's greatest epic poet than would otherwise be possible. 
Few of Macaulay's statements are to be accepted without 
scrutiny, yet there are few passages in the whole essay which 
are not suggestive and fruitful of thought, and in this, perhaps, 
lies its greatest value. 

The allusions are annotated in the ensuing pages with suffi- 
cient fulness to enable the student who is not supplied with 

91 



92 ^^OTES 

reference books to understand the text. Bat those who have 
access to encyclopaedias and dictionaries should not rely upon 
the notes alone. The essays of Macaulay form a rich mine of 
suggestions and allusions, and if it is carefully worked, and each 
allusion and suggestion followed to its source, the student will 
acquire a great treasure both of information and of discipline. 

Page 1, line 1. Mr. Lemon. During the first part of the 
present century this gentleman arranged and classified a great 
mass of state papers relating to the Commonwealth, and among 
them a complete series of the orders of state which were issued 
during this period. In the course of his investigations he 
found an order, dated April 17, 1655, which retired Milton 
from his duties as Latin Secretary upon a pension of £150. It 
is also known that Milton entered at this time upon the composi- 
tion of three great works — Paradise Lost, a Latin Thesaurus, 
and a body of Divinity, compiled from the Holy Scriptures, 
all of which he completed. The first two were published, but 
the last was lost and was not recovered until 1823, whin 
it was accidentally discovered in the manner related in the 
text. The full title of the work is '■'• Joannis Miltoni Angli de 
Doctrina Christiana, ex sacris dumtaxat Lihris petita. Dis- 
quisitionum Lihri Duo Posthumi^ It is evident from the clos- 
ing words of this title that Milton intended it for posthumous 
publication. Mr. Lemon after a long investigation has concluded 
that in some way Mr. Skinner became implicated in a plot 
against the government and that his papers were confiscated, 
and thus the treatise found a place among the government 
archives. 

1. 6. Secretary. Milton was appointed Latin Secretary in 
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by Cromwell in 1649, which 
position he held until the Restoration in 1660. 



NOTES 93 

1. 7. The Popish Trials. In 1678 Titus Gates, a notorious 
renegade, accused a number of the Catholic nobility and gentry 
of conspiring against Protestantism in England. He gave a 
circumstantial account of various outrages which they contem- 
plated, such as the burning of London, the butchery of leading 
Protesta]its, the landing of a French army to carry out their 
designs by force, etc. Public sentiment was aroused against 
the Catholics and several were tried, condemned, and executed. 
A revulsion of feeling soon followed, and the testimony of Gates 
was entirely discredited. 

1. 8. The Rye-house Plot was a scheme devised by some 
English Whigs to murder Charles II., and call the Duke of 
Monmouth to the throne. 

1. 9. Mr. Skinner, Merchant. Cyriac Skinner was Milton's 
favorite pupil and later his familiar friend. Milton dedicated 
two of his sonnets to him, the twenty-first and twenty-second. 
The latter is the beautiful and pathetic one composed on the 
loss of his sight. 

1. 12. Wood and Toland. Anthony Wood, (1632-1695), was 
born in Gxford, England, and devoted his life chiefly to record- 
ing the history of the edifices and the scholars of his native city. 
He gave a sketch of Milton in his Athenae Oxonienses. John 
Toland, (1669-1722), was a noted Pantheist and enemy to re- 
vealed religion. He wrote a life of Milton in 1698, which was 
prefixed to an edition of his Prose Works. 

Page 2, line 4. The terms Whig and Tory, as political ap- 
pellations, were first used in 1680, being inspired by the exceed- 
ingly bitter factional strife which was raging at that time. For 
a definition of these terms see Hume's History of England^ Ch. 
68, also Macaulay's History of England^ Ch. 2. 



94 NOTES 

1. 5. The Oxford Parliament. The Parliament which was 
summoned to meet March 21, 1681, assembled in Oxford in 
order to escape from the influence of factious citizens in London. 

1. 11. Mr. Sumner. Bishop Charles R. Sumner, (1790- 
1874), was librarian and chaplain to George IV. 

Page 3, line 8. See Milton's eleventh sonnet. 

1. 13. Denham. Sir John Denham, (1615-1668), was born 
in Dublin and took a prominent part in public affairs. He 
wrote several poems, among which was the " Elegy on Cowley," 
to which Macaulay here refers. The passage is as follows : 

" To him no author was unknown 
Yet what he Vv^rote was all his own. 
He melted not the ancient gold, 
Nor, with Ben Jonson, did make bold- 
To plunder all the Roman stores 
Of poets, and of orators. 
Horace's wit and Virgil's state 
He did not steal, but emidate ; 
And when he would like them appear, 
Their garb, but not their clothes, did wear." 

1. 14. Cowley, Abraham, (1618-1667). Cowley was a poet 
of great eminence. At the age of fifteen he published a volume 
of poems in which appeared the tragical " History of Py ramus 
and Thisbe," which he had written at the age of ten. The 
student should refer to an eloquent paper in Macaulay's Mis- 
cellanies entitled, "A Conversation between Mr. Abraham 
Cowley and Mr. John Milton touching the Great Civil War," 
which first appeared in Knight's Quarterly Magazine^ August, 
1824. 

Page 4, line 3. Arianism was an ancient heresy first preached 
by Ariu?;. in Alexandria, in the early part of the fourth century. 



NOTES 95 

Its main features were in opposition to the orthodox conceptions 
of the Trinity. Milton, Locke, 8ir Isaac Newton, and Isaac 
Watts were all said to be Arians. 

1. 4. his theory on the subject of polygamy. It is a sur- 
prising fact that Milton commits himself on the side of polygamy 
by seeking to establish both its lawfulness and its honorable 
nature. See his Prose Works in Bohn's Standard Library, 
Vol. IV., 225-235. 

1. 9. the nature of Deity. Macaulay's reference here is not 
clear. Milton's conception of the Divine Nature does not seem 
to have differed materially from that generally accepted by re- 
ligious people to-day. See his Prose Works referred to above, 
Vol. IV., 1-181. 

1. 10. the eternity of matter. Milton's discussion of the 
origin of matter is far from clear, and the translator admits that 
he is not sure he has caught the author's meaning, as the text is 
evidently corrupt. 

1, IL observation of the Sabbath. Milton's words are 
these: "Since, then, the Sabbath was originally an ordinance 
of the Mosaic law, imposed upon the Israelites alone, and that 
for the express purpose of distinguishing them from other na- 
tions, it follows that, if (as was shown in the former book) those 
who live under the gospel are emancipated from the ordinances 
of the law in general, least of all can they be considered as 
bound by that of the Sabbath, the distinction being abolished 
which was the special cause of its institution." 76/(7., Vol. V., 
68. 

1. 19. Defensio Populi. A treatise written in answer to 
Salmasiu.s's Defence of the King. Claudius Salmasius, who was 
a professor in the University of Leyden, issued his celebrated 



96 NOTES 

tractate in 16Jt9, and Milton at once wrote and pnblisbed his 
powerful answer, of which St. John says : " He [Milton] yielded 
to the influence of example and to the temptations of the sub- 
ject ; and in defending the people of this country for the most 
extraordinary action recorded in their annals, condescended to 
chastise a pedantic sophist in a manner altogether unsuited to 
his dignity. Yet it is a work of extraordinary merit, full of 
learning and eloquence and pervaded throughout by an ardent 
love of liberty.'" He strained his eyes so severely in the com- 
position of this work that he became blind. 

Page 5, line 5. Capuchins were a branch of the Order of 
Franciscan monks founded in 1525, in Urbino, Italy. The 
name is derived from the Latin cappa, a head covering, and was 
given to them on account of the peculiar hoods which were 
chosen as the badge of the order. 

1. 20. It is hard to see in what sense INIilton can be called 
the "Martyr of English Liberty" unless reference is made to 
his blindness, incurred by his ardor in defence of the people. 
The other epithets are fully merited. 

Page 6, line 20. " an age too late." Paradise Lost, Bk. 
IX., 1. 44. 

1. 22. butt of clumsy ridicule. See Johnson's " Life of Mil- 
ton," in The Lives of the Poets. Wliile Johnson's estimate of 
Milton was not exalted, he nowhere makes him the butt of 
clumsy ridicule. 

Page 7, line 4. Macaulay's theory of poetry as stated in this 
passage should not be accepted by the student without question. 
While some of his statements are in the main true, his position 
as a whole is untenable. It is evidently not true that as civili- 
zation advances poetry declines. The whole tendency of modern 



NOTES 97 

literature disproves this. Yet it is undoubtedly true that the 
kind of poetry which flourishes in the earlier life of a people, as 
for example the epic and folk-lore poems, does decline, but it is 
only to give place to a loftier and more retined method of poetic 
expression. If the student will compare Chaucer, who stands 
upon the threshold of English literature, with Tennyson, in 
whom the poetic thought of the race reaches its greatest heights 
and finds its most perfect expression, the fallacy of Macaulay's 
argument will be at once apparent. 

Page 8, line 6. Mrs. Marcet was a writer on popular science 
who did a great deal to familiarize the masses with its leading 
facts. Besides the book named, she wrote similar works on 
Chemistry, Botany, Natural Thilosophy, and Land and Water. 
She lived in the first half of the present century. 

1. 7. Montague, Charles, Earl of Halifax, (1661-1715). A 
noted statesman. See Macaulay's History of England. 

1. 8. Walpole, Sir Robert, (1676-1745), was one of the most 
noted of English statesmen. He became Prime Minister under 
George I., and from 1721 to 1742 was the virtual ruler of Eng- 
land. His power was exerted in the interests of peace and 
sound finance, but not always in the interests of morality. He 
was noted for the boldness with which he resorted to bribery, 
and the saying, "Every man has his price," is said to have 
originated with him. For a striking delineation of this remark- 
able man see McCarthy's Four Georges. 

1. 11. Newton, Sir Isaac, (1642-1727), was one of the most 
illustrious of English philosophers and scientists. The crown- 
ing glory of his life was the formulation of the theory of Uni- 
versal Gravitation. Sir James Mcintosh says : "Shakespeare, 
Milton, Locke, and Newton are four names beyond competition 



98 yOTES 

superior to any that the Continent can put against them ; " and 
Pope writes : 

" Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: 
God said ' Let Newton be ' and all was light." 

Page 9, line 16. Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, third 
Earl of, (1671-1713), was a member of Parliament, but his chief 
distinction was as a writer. His most celebrated work was his 
Characteristics of 3Ien, Matters^ Opinions^ and Times. 

1. 17. Helvetius, Claude Adrien, (1715-1771). A French 
encyclopgedist. His fame chiefly rests upon his book entitled, 
De I ^Esprit, in which he sought to overthrow existing concep- 
tions in reference to human life, and advocated the complete 
abandonment of man to the gratification of his appetites and 
passions. This book exerted a fearfully destructive influence 
upon the morals of the times. The student should study this 
passage carefully and determine for himself whether Macaulay's 
statements are true. 

1. 22. Niobe. A character in Greek mythology, whose 
twelve children were slain because of her presumption in claim- 
ing superiority to a goddess. In pity for her grief the gods 
changed her to a stone and fixed her forever on the side of a 
mountain. Though turned to stone, Niobe still wept, and she is 
to-day used as the personification of inconsolable grief. 

1. 23. Aurora, in Greek mythology, was the Goddess of the 
. Dawn. 

Page 10, line 4. Mandeville, Bernard de, (1670-1733), was 
a writer of some note, but his works were frequently licentious 
and vulgar. TJie Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Puhlick 
Benefits, etc., was a social satire which sought to prove that the 
vices of societ}' are the foundation of civilization. 



NOTES 99 

1. 4. lago. A character in Shakespeare's Othello, The Moor. 

Page n, line 2. This quotation is from Midsiimmer NighVs 
Dream, Act V., Scene 1. Macaulay also refers to the preced- 
ing lines : 

" The poet's eye iu a fine frenzy rolling, 
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; 
And, as imagination," etc. 

Page 12, line 14. The Greek Rhapsodists were wandering 
minstrels, whose occupation was the recital of the Homeric and 
other heroic poems. They were accustomed to declaim in a 
theatrical and sensational manner, seeking to move their audi- 
ences by means of gestures and varying inflections of the voice. 

1. 14. Plato, (428-346 b.c), was the greatest of Grecian 
pliilosophers, and was the friend and disciple of Socrates. 
Some of his best known works are 77ie Hepiiblic, The Apology 
and Crlto, and 'J he Fhcedo. 

Page 18, line 11. It will be profitable to compare Macaulay 's 
theory of poetry with the definitive statements contained in tlie 
following passages : 

"We listen to the poet — we allow him to sing to us while 
other men are only allowed to talk, not because he argues more 
logically than they but because he feels more deeply and per- 
haps more truly. . . . 

" The 'message ' of poetry must be more unequivocal, more 
thoroughly accentuated than that of any of the other fine* 
arts. . . . 

"It is an inspiration indeed. No man can write a line of 
genuine poetry without having been ' born again ' (or, as the 
true reading of the text says, 'born from above')." — Theo- 
dore Watts in Encydopcedia Britannica. 



100 NOTES 

"The poet is the man in whom these powers are in balance, 
the man without impediment, who sees and handles that which 
others dream of, traverses the whole scale of experience, and is 
representative of man in virtue of being the largest power to 
receive and impart." — Emerson in The Poet. 

"All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful 
feelings. 

"A poet is a man endued with more lively sensibility, more 
enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of 
human nature and a more comprehensive soul than are supposed 
to be common among mankind. 

"The object of poetry is truth, not individual and local, but 
general and operative ; not standing upon external testimony, 
but carried alive into the heart by passion." — Wordsworth. 

"Poetry secretes the ideal ; therefore poetry is a hunger of 
the soul." — Victor Hugo. 

" For poetry the idea is everything ; the rest is a world of 
illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the 
idea ; the idea is the fact. . . . Finely and truly docs Words- 
worth call poetry ' the impassioned expression which is the 
countenance of all science,' and what is a countenance without 
its expression ? Again Wordsworth finely and truly calls poetry 
' the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.' . . . 

" The best poetry will be found to have a power of forming, 
sustaining, and delighting us as nothing else can." — Matthew 
Arnold, Essay on Poetry. 

"To teach — to please — comprise the poet's views, 
Or else at once to profit and amuse." 

— Horace, Ars Poetica. 

" Poetry is more serious and more philosophical than History, 



NOTES 101 

because it deals with universal truth, not that which lies in de- 
tails." — Leigh Hunt, 

" What is called poetic insight is the gift of discerning in this 
sphere of strangely mingled elements the beauty and the majesty 
which are compelled to assume a garb so sordid." — Hawthorne. 

"For poetry is the blossom and fragrance of all human 
knowledge, human thought, human passions, emotions, lan- 
guage." — Coleridge. 

" The field of the historian is the past, that of the poet, the 
present. The history of an age cannot be written until a cen- 
tury has given it perspective. Poetry is the deep cry of the 
present. Art at its highest is prophetic — it is vision. Where 
the musician's work ends, the poet proceeds, and the poet at 
his best is a seer. Truth becomes intuitive, revelation direct." 

Dr. N. I. RUBINKAM. 

Page 14, line 8. Rabbinical literature. A term sometimes 
used to include the whole body of Jewish literature, but it 
properly includes only those writings which were the result of 
the literary and religious activity of the rabbinical schools, such 
as the Talmud. 

1. 13. Petrarch, Francesco (1304-1370). A noted Italian 
poet and scholar. He was especially renowned for the beauty 
and grace of his lyric verse. His best known works are those 
which celebrate his love for Laura, whose name is inseparably 
connected with his. 

1.20. Johnson, Samuel (1709-1784). A critic and moralist. 
He probably did more to influence the literary life of the eigh- 
teenth century and mould its character than any other man. 
His best known works are Basselas, or the Prince of Abyssinia, 
The Dictionary, his contributions to the Idler, and Bambler, 



102 NOTES 

and his Lives of the Poets. It is in tliis last named work that 
the sketch of jNIilton is found to which tlie author refers. 

Page 15, line 8. Epistle to Manso. (Johannes Baptista 
Mansus. ) The epistle referred to is in the form of a Latin poem 
addressed to the most distinguished of all the Italians, whom 
Milton met on his European trip. The subject of the poem was 
widely known as an author and a patron of letters, and was the 
bosom friend of the two greatest Italian poets of that period, 
Tasso and Marini. Milton pays a higR compliment to Mansus 
and furtively announces his purpose of writing an epic on 
King Arthur. 

" O were it my good luck to have such a friend in the future, 
One that should know as well what is due the children of Phoebus, 
If I should ever recall into song the kings of my countrj^ 
Arthur still from his underground stirring the warlike commotion, 
Or should tell of those that were leagued with the knights of his 
Table." 

It is needless to say that this purpose was sacrificed to a 
nobler one. 

1. 22. Paradise Lost, IV., 551-554. 

Page 18, line 6. Cassim. The brother of Ali Baba in the 
famous Arabian Nights tale of Ali Baba, or the Forty Thieves. 

1. 9. Dryden, John, (1631-1700), was the greatest English 
poet during the interval between the ages of Milton and Words- 
worth. He excelled in epic and lyric poetry, but wrote a great 
many dramas, which, although popular at the time of their pro- 
duction, are of a low order both from a literary and ethical 
standpoint. Reference is here made to his drama entitled the 
State of Lmocence, which is based on Milton's version of the 
fall of man. 



NOTES 103 

1. 16. muster rolls of names. For example see tlie catalogue 
of demons, Paradise Lost, I., 39. 

Page 20, line 6. Byron, Lord George Gordon, (1788-1824), 
was one of the most noted of modern English poets. His best 
known works are : English Bards and Scotch lieviewers, The 
Giaour, Don Jumi, The Corsair, and Childe Harold. 

1.15. Harold. "The Pilgrimage of Childe Harold" is a 
poem in the Spenserian measure descriptive of the scenes 
through which Byron passed in his travels, and here is used for 
the author himself. 

Page 21, line 3. ^schylus, (525-456 b.c), was the first of 
the great Greek Dramatists. Only seven of his plays are extant 
although he wrote a great many more. These are Prometheus 
Unbound, Eumenides, Agamemnon, The Persians, The Chce,- 
phori, The Suppliants, and The Seven against Thebes. The 
references in the text are to the Agamemnon and The Seven 
against Thebes. 

1. 9. Herodotus. The earliest and, next to Thucydides, the 
greatest of the Greek historians. His subject was the Persian 
Wars and the causes which led up to them. He includes in his 
narrative a description of the various Asiatic peoples and a 
remarkable book on Egypt and the Egyptians. 

1. 15. Pindar, (522-450 b.c. about). A great lyric poet of 
Greece, known as the Theban Eagle. 

Page 22, line 2. Sophocles, (495-405 b.c), was the second 
great Greek dramatist who is said to have brought drama from 
the skies to the earth, ^schylus found his subject matter in 
the gods and their struggles with one another, while Sophocles 
descended to earth and found his subject in man and his pas- 
sions. The best known of his dramas is Antigone. 



104 ^''OTES 

1. 7. Euripides, (485-406 b.c), was the third of the great 
dramatic trio, and perhaps tlie greatest. Among his greatest 
works are Medea, the Electra, tlie Alcestis, and the Bacchce. 

1. 18, See Midsummer KirjhVs Dream, Act III., Sc. 1. This 
comparison is far-fetched and absurd. 

Page 23, line 16. The Italian Masque, according to Ward, 
"was, properly speaking, nothing more nor less than a dance 
with masks, and a dance always remained its central point." 
In the sixteenth century the Masque gained rapidly in ingenuity 
and complexity of plan, expense, and magnificence. It was 
first introduced into England in 1512, by Henry VIII., and was 
represented by Shakespeare in Henry VIIL, Act I., Sc. 4. 

1. 19. Faithful Shepherdess, a pastoral drama by John 
Fletcher produced in 1610. A part of Milton's Comus is almost 
a verbal transcript of this pastoral. 

1. 20. Aminta, a pastoral drama by Tasso produced in 1673. 

1. 21. Pastor Fide, a pastoral by Guarini of Ferrara pro- 
duced in 1585. This passage illustrates a habit of Macaulay in 
classifying or grading authors according to his estimate of their 
merits. Other illustrations of the same characteristic may be 
found in this essay. 

Page 25, line 3. Sir Henry Wotton, (1568-1639), a poet and 
man of letters. He was provost of Eton College and a warm 
admirer of Milton. 

1. 4. dorique. The reference is to the Doric style of archi- 
tecture, which was the earliest developed, simplest, and most 
refined of the classical orders. 

1. 13. Thyrsis, an attendant spirit who appears habited like 
Thyrsis, a shepherd, in Comus. See the Epilogue. 



NOTES 105 

1. 22. The Hesperides, in Greek mythology the daughters 
of Atlas and Hesperis. They were set to watch the garden of 
the gods, which was located on an island on the other side of 
Oceanus, where day and night meet. 

Page 26, line 18. Divine Comedy, one of the four great 
epics of the world written by Dante, the most distinguished of 
Italian poets. It is divided into three parts : the Inferno, the 
Furgatorio, and the Paradiso. Dante Alighieri was born in 
1265 and died in 1321. His name is inseparably connected with 
that of Beatrice, a beautiful maiden with whom he fell in love, 
but who died in early life. It was through her influence that 
he wrote many of the poems which caused him to be ranked 
among the best of poets. 

The comparison which Macaulay institutes between Milton 
and Dante is interesting and suggestive but does scant justice 
to the latter. The student should refer to Macaulay 's "Criti- 
cism on Dante," in his 3Iiscellanies. Milton refers to Dante, 
as follows : 

" Fairest of stars, last in the train of night 
If better thou belong not to the dawn, 
Sure pledge of day, that crown 'st the smiling morn 
With thy bright circlet." 

Page 27, line 21. The Adige, a river of Tyrol in northern 
Italy, the Roman Athesis. 

1. 22. Trent, the chief city of non-German Tyrol, on the 
Adige. It is surrounded by embattled walls, which, with its 
church towers, palaces, and ruined castles, give it, when seen 
from a distance, a very imposing appearance. 

1. 22. Phlegethon, in Greek mythology a river of fire in the 
lower world which flows into the Acheron. 



lUG XOTES 

1. 23. Aqua Cheta. A river in eastern Italy. The passage 
referred to is as follows : 

" E'en as the river, that holds on its course 
Unmingled, from the mount of Vesulo, 
On the left side of Apenniiie, toward 
The east, which Acquacheta higher up 
They call, ere it descend into the vale, 
At Forliby that name no longer known, 
Rebellows o'er Saint Benedict, roll'd on 
From the Alpine summit down a precipice, 
Where space enough to lodge a thousand spreads." 

Inferno, XVI., 94-102. 

1.23. St. Benedict, (480-543), the founder of monasticism 
in the AVest. He originated the order of Benedictine monks 
and founded the famous monastery of Monte Cassino. 

1. 25. Aries, a city in France on the left bank of the Rhone, 
near its mouth. It is especially noted for its antiquities. See 
Inferno, IX., III. 

Page 28, line 6. See Paradise Lost, Bk. I., 192-208. 

1. 10. See Paradise Lost, IV., 985-989. 

1. 13. Nimrod, according to Gen. x. 8-12, a grandson of 
Ham and a mighty hunter. He is the reputed founder of the 
empire of Assyria. Inferno, XXXI., 52-60. 

1. 24. lazar-house, a hospital or pest house. The word is 
derived from Lazarus, and means a leper in its original signifi- 
cation. See Paradise Lost, II., 477. 

Page 29, line. 1. Malebolge was the eighth circle of hell, 
known as the "evil pits," and was located in a deep gulf sur- 
rounded by ten pits or trenches. The last of these "wards," 



XOTES 107 

" steams with the insufferable stench of the loathsome spirits 
of forgers and falsifiers, counterfeiters and liars, piled in foul 
and leprous heaps." Infer )io, Canto XVIII. 

1. 9. Valdichiana, formerly a swampy tract of land in the 
eastern part of Tuscany, but now reclaimed and converted into 
one of the most productive parts of Italy. Inferno, XXIX., 
44-50. 

1. 21. Ibid., I., 114. 

1.23. "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." Ibid., 
m., 9. 

1. 24. Gorgon (Medusa). Ibid., IX., 56. 

Page 30, line 1. Among the dragons mentioned by Dante in 
the Inferno were Barbariccia or Crispbeard (Cantos XXI. and 
XXII.), and Draghignazzo or Dragonface (Cantos XII., 73, and 
XXI., 121). 

1. 2. Lucifer, "Hell's Monarch." Ibid., XXXIV., 67. 

1. 3. mountain of expiation. Mount of Purgatory. 

1. 4, marked by the purifying angel. Purgatory, IX., 100. 

1. 10. Amadis of Gaul. The legendary hero of a famous 
mediaeval romance of chivalry. 

1. 11. Gulliver. Referring, of course, to Gulliver's Travels 
by Dean Swift. 

Page 32, line 13. This statement will not bear investigation. 
The original Aryans probably worshipped one inclusive deity, 
the Sky God, but the earliest inhabitants of Greece were un- 
doubtedly nature-worshippers. See the interesting chapter on 
the " Greek Religion " in Keary's Dawn of Civilization. 



108 ^-OTES 

1. 25. See Chapter XVI. of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the 
Boman Empire. 

Page 33, line 13. Synagogue. Used here to denote the 
Jews. 

1. 13. The Academy. Originally a garden or grove in the 
suburbs of Athens, where I'lato was accustomed to meet his 
disciples, and from which his system was called the Academic 
School. The name is derived from Academus, the name of the 
person who, according to tradition, gave the garden to the city. 

1. 14. the Portico. Zeno, the founder of the School of Phi- 
losophy known as the Stoics, was wont to discourse in the porch 
or stoa. 

1. 14. the fasces of the Lictor became the symbol of the im- 
perial power of Eome. 

1. 20. St. George is the national saint of England, in conse- 
quence of the miraculous assistance rendered by him to the 
armies of the Christians under Godfrey of Bouillon during the 
first crusade. 

1. 20. St. Elmo's. The reference is to St. Elmo's fire. 

1. 22. Cecilia. St. Cecilia was a Christian martyr who died 
at Rome in 230. Dryden alludes to her in his "Ode for St. 
Cecilia's Day," and her story is told by Chaucer in the Second 
Niui's Tale. 

Page 34, line 4. In the earlier Christian centuries an "im- 
age " was a representation on a plane surface or a mosaic. In 
the eighth century a movement was inaugurated by Pope Leo 
III., looking towards the abolition of image adoration. Those 
who took part in the movement were called "iconoclasts" or 
" image-breakers." 



NOTL'S 109 

Page 30, line 18. Don Juan. A legendary nobleman of 
Spain, who was believed to have sold himself to the devil, in 
order to gratify his evil desires. The allusion here is to the 
tradition that Don Juan at one time made a feast and invited 
the statue erected to one of his victims to be present. During 
the progress of the feast he challenged the spirit, whose exist- 
ence he denied, to manifest itself to him, whereupon the spirit 
proved its existence and power and condemned him to perdition. 
This story forms the theme of one of Mozart's operas, Don 
Giovanni, also of Byron's well-known poem. 

1. 23. Farinata of the Uberti was one of the most conspicuous 
characters among the Florentine Ghibellines of the thirteenth 
century. In the Inferno he was condemned to hell because he 
held to the Epicurean philosophy. Inferno, Canto X. 

1. 25. auto da fe. An act of faith. The name given, in 
Spain and Portugal, to the act of burning heretics. 

Page 37, line 1. Beatrice was the maiden to whom Dante 
had plighted his faith. Her influence over him was very great, 
and inspired him to much of his best work, although she died at 
an early age. 

1. 7. Mount of Purgatory. Beatrice, reciprocating the love 
of Dante, and urged by Mercy and Grace, descends from Para- 
dise to the Lower World. There she engages the shade of Ver- 
gil to conduct Dante to the summit of the Mount of Purgatory, 
where she promises to await their arrival. This mountain is 
described by Dante as the loftiest elevation on the globe. At 
its summit is the Garden of Eden, the Earthly Paradise, from 
which Adam and Eve were expelled. 

The interview with Beatrice begins in the Purgatorio, Canto 
XXX. 



110 NOTES 

1. 13. Tasso, Torquato, (1544-1595). A celebrated Italian 
poet. His great work is the immortal epic, Gerusalemme 
Liherata. 

1. 13. Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, (1724-1803). A noted 
German poet. Among his works are The Death of Adam, 
Solomon, and David. 

Page 38, line 13. Prometheus. A character in Greek my- 
thology. For a deceit practised upon him by Prometheus Zeus 
denied the use of fire to mortals, but Prometheus stole a burning 
ember from heaven and brought it to earth in a hollow tube. 
For this he was chained upon the top of a mountain, where his 
liver was daily consumed by an eagle and daily renewed. 

Page 40, line 18. Job x. 22. 

Page 42, line 23. Theocritus was a Greek poet who flour- 
ished in the first half of the third century e.g., both at Alexan- 
dria and at Syracuse. Many of his poems were bucolic, and 
treated of the homely scenes of country life. He is called the 
last true Greek poet. 

1. 23. Ariosto, Ludovico, (1474-1533), an Italian poet, whose 
greatest work is Orlando Furioso. " Ariosto," says Hallam, 
" has been after Homer the favorite poet of Europe. His grace 
and facility, his clear and rapid stream of language, his variety 
and beauty of invention, and his very transitions of subject left 
him no rival in general popularity." 

Page 43, line 14. Sonnets. Milton wrote twenty-three son- 
nets, of Avhich five are in Italian. 

1. 17. Filicaja, Vincenzo, (1642-1707), a poet, scholar, and 
jurist of Italy. His sonnets are models of lofty thought and 
purity of style, and are excelled by few in any language. His 



^'OT£:s 111 

celebrated sonnet " L' Italia" was translated by Byron and in- 
troduced into the fourth canto of Childe Harold, in the passage 
beginning " Italia, O Italia ! " 

1. 19. Petrarch, Francesco, (1304-1374), an Italian poet and 
scholar. He was specially noted for the beauty of the verse in 
which he celebrated his love for Laura, with whom his name 
has been associated much as that of Dante is associated with 
Beatrice. 

Page 44, line 5. the Greek Anthology is a collection of the 
most beautiful passages, chiefly poetical, from classic Greek 
authors. The word means literally a flower-gathering. 

Page 45, line 1. Oromasdes and Arimanes, or Ormuzd and 
Ahriman, were recognized as the personifications of good and 
evil in the old Persian religion. The former was believed to be 
the omniscient, omnipresent source of all good, and was op- 
posed by Ahriman, over whom he would eventually triumph. 
Byron has introduced Arimanes, as the Prince of Evil, in his 
drama of Manfred. 

Page 46, line 4. Mrs. Hutchinson, (1620-1659), was the Avife 
of a soldier in the parliamentary army, whose life she wrote. 

1. 5. May's History. Thomas May, (1594-1650), was a his- 
torian and poet. During the reign of Charles I. he was a 
favorite at court, but for some reason he abandoned the roycil 
cause at the outbreak of the rebellion and offered his services 
to Parliament. He was appointed secretary and historiogra- 
pher, and in this latter capacity wrote a History of the Parlia- 
ment which began Nov. 3, J 640. This history covered only 
about three years of the struggle. 

1. 7. Ludlow, Edmund, (1620-1693), was a member of the 
court which condemned Charles L , but was opposed to Crom- 



112 NOTES 

well's assumption of the protectorate. At the Restoration he 
retired to Switzerland, where the remainder of his life was 
spent. The work referred to is his Memoirs. 

1. 9. Oldmixon, Jolm, (1673-1742), was the author of a Crit- 
ical History of England, written from a Wliig standpoint. 

1. 10. Catherine Macaulay, (1733-1791), the author of a 
History of England, beginning with the reign of James I. 

1. 14. Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of, (1609-1674), a noted 
English statesman and historian, who followed the fortunes of 
Charles I. during the Civil AVar. He remained with Charles II. 
during the continuance of the Commonwealth, and returned 
with him in 1660. After that he became Prime Minister and 
Lord Chancellor, but having incurred the ill will of the House 
of Commons, he was impeached and compelled to take refuge 
in France, where he remained until his death. He wrote a 
History of the Behellion in England, a History of the Civil 
War in Ireland, an autobiography, and other works. 

1. 14. Hume, David, (1711-1776), was a noted essayist, phi- 
losopher, and historian. He was one of the greatest thinkers 
Scotland has ever produced. His most important work was 
the History of England, in which he worked his way back 
from the Stuarts to the Tudors, and ultimately back to the 
Roman occupation. His convictions and prejudices were so 
strong that he was very far from being an impartial historian. 
He could see no evil in the Stuarts, and but very little good in 
the Tudors, and was strongly opposed to all movements in 
favor of popular freedom. Yet his style is so clear and digni- 
fied and his narrative so entertaining that his history has 
always been popular and widely read. 



NOTES 113 

Page 47, line 24. Laud, William, (1573-1645), was an ener- 
getic and learned man, who was highly esteemed by James I. 
and became a favorite of Charles I. By this ill-fated king he 
was given one office after another until finally he became 
Archbishop of Canterbury. He was bitterly opposed to the 
Puritans, and in his efforts to put down that movement resorted 
to the most extreme measures, thus incurring the implacable 
hatred of the popular party. He was impeached for high trea- 
son by the Long Parliament, and although acquitted by the 
House of Lords he was condemned by the Commons and exe- 
cuted. 

Page 49, lines 1-2. See Paradise Lost, I., 164-165. 

11. 7-9. The references, of course, are to the Roman Catho- 
lics and to Ireland. 

1. 22. Somers and Shrewsbury were trusted councillors of 
William. 

Page 50, line 7. Ferdinand V. , known as the Catholic, was 
king of Castile and Aragon. It was his queen, Isabella, who 
was the patroness of Columbus. He instituted the Inquisition. 

1. 8. Frederick, the Protestant. Probably Frederick V., the 
Elector Palatinate, who was raised to this position in 1619, 
and was noted for his violent and injudicious advocacy of the 
cause of Protestantism. Macaulay's reference here is not 
clear. He may have reference to the reigning sovereigns of 
Spain and Prussia at the time when he wrote this essay, and 
who were respectively Catholic and Protestant, which reference 
is more in harmony with the spirit of the passage. 

1. 18. Goldsmith's Abridgment. The work referred to is 
the History of England by Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774), who 



114 NOTES 

is better known as the author of the Deserted Village and The 
Vicar of Wakefield. 

Page 52, line 1. The Declaration of Right was a state paper 
presented to William and Mary, which asserted certain rights 
which James II. had violated and claimed various privileges. 
This Declaration was afterwards passed by I'arliament, and 
became known as the Bill of Rights. The great historical facts 
alluded to in this passage should be familiar to every student. 

1. 21. Ship-money, a tax formerly laid in England upon sea- 
port towns in time of war to furnish the means of repelling in- 
vasion. Charles, when refused supplies by Parliament, levied 
this tax upon inland as well as upon seaboard towns. 

1. 22. The Star Chamber was an arbitrary court of justice 
which flourished during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth 
centuries. Its name is derived from the room in which it held 
its sessions, which was decorated with gilt stars. It was abol- 
ished in 1641 by the Long Parliament. 

Page 53, line 24. The Petition of Right was a celebrated 
English statute passed early in the reign of Charles I. Its pur- 
pose was to restrain and limit the prerogatives of the crown 
and to establish certain rights of the people. Charles gave his 
assent to all its provisions, but afterwards deliberately violated 
them. 

Page 54, line 17. le Roi le veut? The formula by which 
the king signified his assent to a bill passed by Parliament. 

Page 55, line 19. The following passage furnishes a good 
example of Macaulay's use of the antithetical sentence, to 
which mode of expression he resorted frequently and with 
great power and effect. 



NOTES 115 

Page 56, line 5. Vandyke dress. Sir Anthony Vandyke was 
a famous Flemish painter who settled in England. He painted 
a famous portrait of Charles, also one of his children. 

Page 57, line 23. Strafford, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of, 
(1593-16-11), was one of the councillors of Charles I. He was 
executed in 1641, after the Commons had passed a hill of 
attainder against him. 

Page 58, line 5, Quakers. The Society of Friends was insti- 
tuted by George Fox, who was born in 1624. The new sect 
increased with great rapidity, and suffered from several severe 
persecutions. A few of its members committed some excesses, 
but the inference contained in this passage was hardly justifiable. 

1. 6. Fifth Monarchy Men. A small religious sect which 
flourished in England during Cromwell's protectorate. They 
professed to believe that the time was near at hand when the 
four great monarchies of Daniel's prophetic vision should give 
way to a fifth, of which Jesus was to be king. 

1. 8. Agag, king of the Amalekites, was slain by Samuel. 
See 1 Samuel xv. 33. 

Page 60, line 3. The reference is to the famous wines which 
are produced so abundantly on the banks of the Rhine and at 
Xeres (Chareth), wdiich is a town, not a river, in the province 
of Cadiz in Spain. It gives its name to the sherry wine which 
is produced in the fertile plain in the midst of which the town 
is located. 

1. 24. Orlando Furioso, XLIII., 72. 

Page 63, line 6. The Regicides. The name given to the 
court which condemned and executed Charles I. 



116 NOTES 

1. 17. Jefferies, George, (1648-1689), Chief Justice and Chan- 
cellor during the reign of James. He was unscrupulous and 
cruel, and participated in nearly all the excesses of James. He 
is remembered chiefly for the "bloody assizes," which he con- 
ducted after Monmouth's rebellion, to punish the adherents of 
this ill-fated prince, in which he caused three hundred and 
twenty people to be executed and more than eight hundred to 
be sold into slavery. 

1. 19. the Boyne. The battle of the Boyne River, in which 
William III. defeated James II., July 1, 1690. 

Page 67, line 7. Venetian oligarchy. The government of 
Venice was originally democratic, but the power was gradually 
concentrating in the hands of the aristocracy, and at the end of 
the thirteenth century Venice really ceased to be a democracy. 

1. 16. Dutch Stadtholder. A governor of a country or 
province. The name was first given to William, Prince of 
Orange, who headed the great revolt against Spain. 

1. 25. Bolivar (bo-le^-var). Simon, (1783-1830), was a South 
American patriot, who liberated Venezuela and New Granada 
from the Spanish rule. He also liberated Peru, the southern 
part of which was erected into an independent state in 1825, 
and named, after him, Bolivia. 

Page 60, line 13. Instrument of Government. The formal 
deed by which Parliament surrendered its powers into the hands 
of Cromwell and defined his powers and duties, passed December 
18, 1653. 

1. 13. Humble Petition and Advice. A bill passed May 8, 
1657, increasing Cromwell's powers and prerogatives, and taking 
the place of the Instrument of Government. 



NOTES 111 

Page 70, line 5. The Independents. Tartly a religious and 
partly a political party, originated during the great rebellion. 
They recognized no form oi: church government except that 
which each church instituted and exercised over its own mem- 
bers. They were radicals in politics. 

1. 11. If Macaulay meant to apply this characterization to 
the whole nation, it is, of course, a gross exaggeration ; but it is 
a powerful and truthful delineation of the degraded condition 
into which the limited circle of the royal court had sunk. 

1. 17. In order to become independent of Parliament Charles 
entered into a secret treaty with Louis XIV. , king of France, 
by which he bound himself to assist Louis in the war against 
Holland, and to do certain other things which were exceedingly 
distasteful to the English people, in return for which he was to 
receive a large stipend annually, and the assistance of a French 
army to put down any insurrection that might rise in England. 

Page 73, line 17. This quotation is from Tasso's Gerusalemme 
Liberata, XV., 57. It is translated literally. "Here is the 
fountain of mirth ; here is the river which in itself contains 
mortal perils ; here now it behooves us to restrain our desire, 
and in our resolve to be strong. ' ' 

Page 74, line 3. friars. This word is derived from the Latin 
frater, and means brother. It was applied to members of the 
four mendicant orders : the Franciscans, commonly called Gray 
Friars, the Dominicans, or Black Friars, the Carmellites, or 
White Friars, and the Augustinians. 

1. 10. The Merchant of Venice, Act III., Sc. 2. 

1. 14. This passage is one of the most powerful and eloquent 
in the whole essay. The student should study it carefully, not 



118 NOTES 

only to master the thought but to observe also its elements of 
strength. To what extent does his consummate art in the use 
of the antithetical and balanced sentences contribute to the 
strength of the passage ? 

Page 77, line 4. Beatific Vision. The inexpressibly glori- 
ous sight which shall break upon the soul when it comes to 
enter heaven. The book of lievelation is frequently called the 
'• Beatific Vision." 

1. 5. Vane, Sir Henry, (1G12-1662), was leader of one of the 
extreme wings of the Puritan party. He was one of the twenty 
persons excepted from the general pardon upon the Restoration 
and was finally tried for treason and beheaded. His religious 
views were millenarian and gave rise to a small religious sect 
known as Yanists. 

1. 7. Fleetwood, Charles, (1620-1661 [?]), was one of the 
prominent parliamentary generals and son-in-law of Cromwell. 
He was characterized by weakness and irresolution, and died in 
wretchedness and obscurity. 

Page 78, line 9. Sir ArtegaPs iron-man Talus. Talus, an 
iron-man, representing the power of the state, was given to Sir 
Artegal by the goddess Astrsea. He carried in his hand an 
iron flail with which he threshed out falsehood and unfolded 
truth. See the Faerie Queene, V., 1. 

1. 24. Dunstan, St., (924-988), Archbishop of Canterbury, 
and a man of great ability and piety. 

1. 24. De Montf ort, Simon, (1150-1218) , was a famous soldier 
who was appointed leader of the crusade against the Albigenses. 
He was noted for the severity and cruelty with which he con- 
ducted this war which resulted in the extermination of an 



NOTES 119 

inoffensive people. His son became Earl of Leicester, in 
England, and is noted as the founder of the House of Commons. 

1. 25. Dominic, St., (1170-1221). The founder of the Order 
of Dominicans. 

1. 25. Escobar, y Mendozar, (1580-1669). A Spanish Jesuit 
celebrated especially for his doctrine that purity of intention 
justifies actions in themselves immoral or criminal. 

Page 79, line 11. careless Gallios. See Acts xviii. 12-17. 

1. 17. Brissotines. Followers of Jean Pierre Brissot, in the 
French Revolution, were advanced revolutionists, but were 
ultimately united with the Girondists. 

Page 80, line 3. Whitefriars was an ancient precinct of 
London which derived its name from the church of the Carmel- 
lite monks, or White Friars. One portion of this district was 
for a long time a sanctuary for criminals. 

1. 14. Janissaries. A body of Turkish infantry, constitut- 
ing the Sultan's body-guard, and the nucleus of his standing 
army. It was first organized in the fourteenth century, but 
was abolished in 1826. The body became very large and tur- 
bulent and often controlled the policy of the government. 

Page 81, line 2. Duessa (false faith). A character in the 
Faerie Qiicene opposed to Fidessa (true faith). 

1. 3. the Redcross Knight represented St. George, who was 
deceived by Duessa, representing herself as Fidessa. 

Page 82, line 10. See Milton's seventh sonnet. 

Page 83, line 9. Syrens. Three sea-nymphs, whose usual 
abode was a small island near Cape Pelorus, in Sicily. They 



120 NOTES 

enticed sailors ashore by their melodious singing and killed 
them. 

1. 11. Circe. A sorceress who changed the companions of 
Ulysses into swine. 

" "Who knows not Circe, 
The daughter of the sun, whose charmed cup 
Whosoever tasted lost his upright shape. 
And downward fell into grovelling swine." 

— Comus. 
1. 18. The lines referred to are these: — 

" But let my due feet never fail 
To walk the studious cloisters pale, 
And love the high embowed roof, 
With antic pillars massy proof, 
And storied windows, richly dight, 
Casting a dim religious light. 
There let the pealing organ blow 
To the full-voiced choir below. 
In service high and authems clear, 
As may with sweetness, through mine ear, 
Dissolve me into ecstasies, 
And bring all heaven before mine eyes." 

Page 85, lines 7-11. See Comus, 815-819. 

1. 22. secular chain. This expression is taken from Milton's 
sonnet to Cromwell, where he says : 

"new foes arise. 
Threatening to bind our souls with secular chains." 

1. 23. Presbj^erian wolf. Macaulay may have had in mind 
the 128th line of Lycidas, 

" Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw 
Daily devours apace." 



NOTES 121 

1. 25. licensing system. The treatise referred to was en- 
titled, " Areopagitica : A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed 
Printing, to the Parliament of England," and was published in 
1644. This treatise was a powerful plea for freedom of thought 
and of its expression. It is regarded by most critics as Milton's 
prose masterpiece. 

Page 86, line 2. frontlets between his eyes. The reference 
is to the old Jewish custom of wearing phylacteries on the fore- 
head. See Exodus xiii. 9, 16 ; Deuteronomy xi. 18. 

Page 87, line 4. At the present stage of civilization it seems 
very strange to find Milton posing not alone as the apologist for 
but even as the advocate of divorce. He wrote a ponderous 
tractate entitled, "The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce re- 
stored to the good of both sexes from the bondage of Canon 
Law and other mistakes to the true meaning of Scripture in the 
Law and Gospel compared. " From a moral standpoint this was 
probably Milton's weakest work. It was no doubt inspired by 
his own domestic troubles, and was an attempt to modify pub- 
lic sentiment for personal considerations. All such efforts, no 
matter how specious the reasoning, must inevitably fail, as this 
has failed, to accomplish the end desired. It must be said, 
however, that this tractate contains the most exhaustive pre- 
sentation of facts relating to the subject and the most thorough 
analysis of all the questions involved that has ever been pre- 
sented. Indeed, he left practically nothing to be added. 

It was followed by "The Judgment of Martin Bucer con- 
cerning Divorce," "Tetrachordon," "Expositions upon the 
Four Chief Places in Scripture AVhich Treat of Marriage 
or Nullities in Marriage," and " Colasterion : A Reply to 
a Nameless Answer against the Doctrine and Discipline of 
Divorce." 



122 NOTES 

11. 8-9. '^ Against opposing forces I contend; nor can that 
force, which subdues others, conquer me, and against the 
swiftly wheeling earth I ride." — Ovid's 3Ietamorphoses, II., 
72, 73. 

1. 15. Burke, Edmund, (1728-1797), one of the most dis- 
tinguished of English statesmen, orators, and writers. He is 
generally conceded to be the greatest prose writer of the eigh- 
teenth century, and by some critics he is ranked as the greatest 
in all the range of English literature. In comparison with 
Macaulay's fulsome praise of Milton's prose works it will be 
interesting to read the views of another critic, also a stanch 
admirer of Milton and a sympathizer with his political views, 
Mr. Mark Pattison. He says: "In Eikonoclastes Milton is 
worse than tedious ; his reply is in a tone of rude railing and 
insolent swagger which would have been always unbecoming, 
but which at this moment was grossly indecent." He speaks 
of Milton's prose pamphlets as being "a plunge into the 
depths of vulgar scurrility and libel below the level of average 
gentility and education." 

Page 88, line 4. Areopagitica. Cf. p. 120. 

1. 5. Eikonoklastes. In answer to a book entitled EiJcon 
Basilike, " the portraiture of his sacred majesty in his solitude 
and sufferings." 

Upon the execution of Charles I. a book entitled Eikon 
Basilike was published under his name. It contained a pathetic 
story of the life and sufferings of the " royal martyr," and was 
given a wide circulation. Parliament, fearing that it might be 
the means of inspiring new dissensions, and of enlisting the sym- 
pathies of the people for the royalist cause, authorized Milton 
to answer it. This answer was most effective, and although 



NOTES 123 

intended by the author merely for a temporary purpose, has 
become a permanent contribution to English literature. 

1. 6. " Treatise of Reformation in England and the causes 
that hitherto have hindered it." 

1. 7. "Animadversions upon the Remonstrant's defence 
against Smectymnuus." The pamphlet which caused the 
preparation of this tractate, purporting to be written by 
Smectymnuus, was composed by live Presbyterian divines, 
the initials of whose names make up the pseudonym, and was 
directed against the Episcopacy, Bishop Hall replied in his 
"Defence of the Remonstrance." "Milton's formidable pen 
was now once more drawn in angry opposition to the prelate," 
and his "Animadversions on the Remonstrant's Defence " were 
thrown into the form of a dialogue, in which his adversary's 
book is made to ask questions which he answers with great vigor 
and in a bitterly controversial spirit. 

Page 89, line 10. Elwood, Thomas. An interesting Quaker 
youth, and one of the few who remained faithful to Milton in 
his later days. 

Page 90, line 8. Massinger, Philip (1584-1640). One of the 
best known of the minor Elizabethan dramatists. The Virgin 
Martyr was his first play. 



INDEX TO NOTES 



Academy, The, 108. 
Adige, The, 105. 
.Eschylus, 103. 
Agag, 115. 

Amadis de Gaul, 107. 
Aminta, 104. 

Animadversions on the Remon- 
strant's Defence, 122. 
Anthology, Greek, 111. 
Aqua Cheta, 105. 
Areopagitica, 120. 
Arianisra, 94. 
Arimaues, 111. 
Ariosto, Ludovico, 110. 
Aries, 106. 

Arnold, Matthew, (quoted), 101. 
Aurora, 98. 
Auto da fe, 109. 

Barbariccia, 107. 
Beatific Vision, 117. 
Beatrice, 109. 
Bolivar, Simon, 116.' 
Boyne, 116. 
Brissotines, 118. 



Burke, Edmund, 121. 
Byron, Lord, 103. 

Capuchins, 96. 
Cassim, 102. 
Cecilia, 108. 
Circe, 119. 

Clarendon, Earl of, 112. 
Coleridge, (quoted), 101. ' 
Cowley, Abraham, 94. 
Cowley, Elegy on, 94. 

Dante, 105. 

Declaration of Right, 113. 

Defensio Populi, 95. 

Deity, Nature of, 95. 

De Montfort, Simon, 118. 

Denham, Sir John, 94. 

Divine Comedy, 105. 

Divinity, Body of, 92. 

Divorce, Doctrine and Discipline 

of, 121. 
Dominic, St., 118. 
Don Juan, 108. 
Draghignazzo, 107. 
125 



126 



INDEX TO NOTES 



Dryden, John, 102. 
Duessa, 119. 
Dunstan, St., 118. 
Dutch Stadtholder, 116. 

Eikon Basilike, 122. 
Eikouoclastes, 121, 122. 
Elegy on Cowley, 94. 
Elwood, Thomas, 123. 
Emerson, (quoted), 100. 
Escobar, 118. 
Euripides, 104. 

Fable of the Bees, 98. 
Faithful Shepherdess, 104. 
Farinata, 109. 
Ferdinand v., 113. 
Fidessa, 119. 

Fifth Monarchy Men, 115. 
Filicaja, Vincenzo, 110. 
Fleetwood, Charles, 118. 
Friars, 117. 
Frontlets, 120. 

Gallios, 118. 

Gerusalemme Liberata, 109. 

Goldsmith's Abridgment, 113. 

Gorgon, 107. 

Guarini, 104. 

Gulliver, 107. 

Harold, Childe, 103. 
Hawthorne, (quoted), 101. 
Helvetius, Claude, 98. 
Herodotus, 103. 



Hesperides, 101. 

Horace, (quoted), 101. 

Hugo, Victor, (quoted), 101. 

Humble Petition and Advice, 116. 

Hume, David, 112. 

Hunt, Leigh, (quoted), 101. 

Hutchinson, Mrs., 111. 

lago, 99. 

Independents, The, 116. 
Instrument of Government, 116. 
Italian Masque, 104. 
Janissaries, 117. 
Jefferies, George, 115. 
Johnson, Samuel, 101. 

Klopstock, Friedrich, 110. 

Latin Thesaurus, 92. 
Laud, William, 112. 
Laura, 101, 111. 
Lazar-house, 106. 
Lemon, Mr., 92. 
Le Roi le vent, 114. 
Licensing System, 120. 
Lictor, Fasces of, 108. 
Lucifer, 107. 
Ludlow, Edmund, 111. 

Macaulay, Catherine, 112. 
Malebolge, 106. 
Mandeville, Bernard de, 98. 
Manso, Epistle to, 102. 
Marcet, Mrs., 97. 
Martyr of English Liberty, 96. 



INDEX TO NOTES 



127 



Massinger, Philip, 123. 
Matter, Eternity of, 95. 
May, Thomas, 111. 
Montague, Charles, 97. 
Mountain of Expiation, 107. 
Mount of Purgatory, 107, 109. 

Names, Muster rolls of, 103. 
Newton, Sir Isaac, 97. 
Nimrod, 106. 
Niobe, 98. 

Oldmixon, John, 111. 
Orlando Furioso, 110. 
Oromasdes, 111. 

Parliament, The Oxford, 94. 
Petition of Right, 114. 
Petrarch, 101, 110. 
Phlegethon, 105. 
Pindar, 103. 
Plato, 99, 108. 
Polygamy, 95. 
Portico, The, 108. 
Presbyterian Wolf, 120. 
Prometheus, 110. 
Purifying Angel, 107. 

Quakers, 115. 

Rabbinical Literature, 101. 
Redcross Knight, 119. 
Regicides, 115. 
Remonstrant's Defence, 122. 
Rhapsodists, The Greek, 97. 



Rubinkam, Dr. N. I., (quoted), 

101. 
Ryehouse Plot, 93. 

vSabbath, Observation of, 95. 

St. Benedict, 106. 

St. Dominic, 118. 

St. Dunstan, 118. 

St. Elmo, 108. 

St. George, 108. 

Salmasius, Claudius, 95. 

Secretary, Latin, 92. 

Secular Chain, 120. 

Shaftesbury, Earl of, 98. 

Ship-money, 114. 

Shrewsbury, 113. 

Sir Artegal's iron-man, 118. 

Skinner, Cyriac, 92, 93. 

Smectymnuus, 122. 

Soraers, 113. 

Sonnets, 110. 

Sophocles, 103. 

Star Chamber, 114. 

Strafford, Earl of, 114. 

Sumner, Bishop Charles R., 94. 

Synagogue, 107. 

Syrens, 119. 

Talus, 118. 

Tasso, Torquato, 109. 

Theocritus, 110. 

Theory of Poetry, Macaulay's, 

96. 
Thyrsis, 104. 
Titus Gates, 93. 



128 



INDEX TO NOTES 



Toland, John, 93. 

Tory, 93. 

Treatise of Keformation, 122. 

Trent, 105. 

Valdichiana, 107. 
Vandyke dress, 114. 
Vane, Sir Henry, 117. 



Walpole, Sir Robert, 97. 
Watts, Theodore, (quoted), 

99. 
Whig, 93. 
Whitefriars, 119. 
Wood, Anthony, 93. 
Wordsworth, (quoted), 101. 
Wotton, Sir Henry, 105. 



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